Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  Amanda was apparently still asleep when he got home, and the house was quiet. He found himself pacing, entirely at loose ends. He was supposed to work on Amanda’s greenhouse today. That’s why he’d gotten up so early, that and the sinkers. That’s what his father had called them—sinkers. The two of them had always stopped on Saturday mornings for coffee and glazed doughnuts on their way to fish off the pier. How long ago had that been? He didn’t like to think about it.

  He was being compulsive, of course. He knew that, and he knew that it should have scared him a little bit. Except that, damn it, a man ought to be able to eat a doughnut now and then without being beat up by guilt. The problem, clearly, wasn’t that he wanted a doughnut—half the population of the world probably wanted a doughnut—it was that Lew had decided to break with tradition and take up banker’s hours.

  It was nearly seven. Usually Amanda was up by seven, but she’d been out late playing Bunko last night. With a little luck she’d really sleep in, and he’d still be able to pull something off, late as it was. On impulse, he went into the kitchen and ransacked the cookbooks, looking for a doughnut recipe. He found nothing but a lengthy account of the intricacies of deep fat frying. Maybe he could make up his own recipe—a couple of cups of flour, some sugar. Yeast? He realized that he hadn’t a clue.

  Irritable now, he looked out the back window at the half-framed greenhouse in the corner of the yard. He had bought a couple dozen old wooden windows at various garage sales, and the idea was to frame the things up into some sort of edifice. Amanda wanted him to keep it simple, and he was agreeable up to a point. He had come up with a couple of bright ideas, though, including a device for rolling and unrolling a shade net, depending on the position of the sun. Thinking about Lew’s unlit sign had started him up. The automatic shade device could run off a slow-speed electric drill hooked up to a photoelectric eye. There was no reason you couldn’t rig it to open and close ventilation windows in the ceiling, too, if you put your mind to it.

  He began to work a plan out in his head—cotton rope and pulleys and a scissors jack—and in a moment he was fired up with the idea of work. To hell with the doughnuts. He had gone without them for three days; he could easily stretch it to four. His embarrassment in the alley today would be a lesson to him. He flipped to a calorie chart in the back of a cookbook and calculated how many calories he would save this week alone if he laid off doughnuts altogether.

  Amanda had a point there. He wasn’t a fat man by any means, but then he couldn’t eat like he used to either. For twenty-five years he had bought pants with a thirty-four inch waist, and he had made a bargain with himself that he would go to his grave wearing the same size pants. But unless he died soon he was going to have to work at it a little bit. He walked out into the living room toward the front door, multiplying a week’s worth of saved calories times fifty-two, but then subtracted two weeks for doughnut holidays. The idea amused him. You didn’t have to swear off forever. He would take it one day at a time, starting now. Temperance was the key. And it was a perfect morning to start, what with Lew betraying him like that.

  He popped the trunk of Amanda’s Toyota, looking for her scissors jack in order to rig up a prototype of the greenhouse device. Lying in the otherwise clean trunk was a big shopping bag with two shoe boxes inside. He stood for a moment looking in at them, the idea of finding the jack abolished from his mind. More shoes. Amanda needed more shoes like an octopus needed more arms.

  He pulled out one of the boxes and looked inside. A cash register receipt lay across a pair of cobalt blue shoes with red stitching and tiny heels that were good for nothing beyond punching dents in the hardwood floor. The other box held an identical pair—same size, same price: sixty bucks a pair. A hundred and twenty bucks! He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent that much on anything.

  Carrying the bag, he headed back into the house and up the stairs. Amanda was awake, sitting up in bed and reading a book. As always, he was struck with how pretty she was when she had her reading glasses on. Looking at her, he very nearly forgot about the shoes, except that on the floor, near the window seat, there were three more pair, the result of last week’s spree.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “Coffee?”

  “Didn’t make any,” he said.

  She saw what he was carrying then, and he knew by her hesitation that she was defensive about it. Probably she had been intending to sneak the shoes in later in the day, while he was out back working his tail off.

  “Thanks,” she said, nodding at the bag. “I picked those up at the mall yesterday. They were on sale. Half price.”

  “Not bad,” Walt said, pretending to be astonished. “Two hundred-forty bucks worth of shoes for a measly hundred-twenty. That’s money in the bank.”

  Seconds ago he had meant to be reasonable, but he realized now that he was peeved and that he hadn’t kept the ironic edge out of his voice. But damn it, women and shoes …

  “What’s got into you?” Amanda asked, taking off her glasses.

  “Me?” Walt said incredulously. “Nothing’s got into me. I’m just hauling in the shoes that you hid in the car, that’s all. Don’t read anything more into it than that.”

  “Hid in the car? That’s asinine, of course. Although if it was true it wouldn’t surprise anyone, seeing you carry on like this. One glance at a couple of pairs of shoes and you’re so mad you can barely speak.”

  “A couple of pairs?” Walt said, turning around and pulling open her closet door. The interior of the closet was a cornucopia of shoes, shoes of every color and shape, maybe sixty or eighty pairs in boxes, the lids torn off the top boxes to reveal the toe-to-heel shoes inside, each pair lying in a little bed of tissue paper. He gestured at them. “Tell me this isn’t compulsive behavior.”

  “Your behavior or mine?” she said flatly.

  “Blue with red stitching? The problem,” he said, just getting warmed up, “is that there are something like four million color combinations in the known universe. You can’t put together a shoe arsenal big enough to have them all covered, especially if you intend to cover them twice. You’ve got to stop somewhere this side of the poorhouse.”

  “Don’t be condescending with your idiot arithmetic,” she said. “And as far as the poorhouse goes, it’s Aunt Janet’s money, you’ll remember, that’s keeping us out of it. It’s why I’m sleeping in and you’re out tinkering with the greenhouse. It’s why both of us are taking an extended holiday instead of working like everyone else. My Aunt Janet.”

  He glared at her but couldn’t think of anything to say. She had him there.

  “In fact,” she said, lightening up a little now that he was at least partly silenced, “I bought the blue and red shoes to wear with the dress you bought me for my birthday. We’re going out Saturday night. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember. My memory isn’t the issue here. But two pairs of the same shoe?”

  “What can I say? I like them. They were perfect. They aren’t going out of style. They were a bargain.”

  “A bargain! What happened to the days when you could get a good pair of shoes for thirty bucks?”

  “Gone,” she said.

  He shook his head. You couldn’t reason with her. The shoes were a monkey on her back.

  “And what shoes are you going to wear Saturday night?” she asked him, dragging in a red herring.

  It threw him farther off, but then he saw the toes of his good leather shoes sticking out from under the bed, and he reached down and pulled them out. “These,” he said. “The shoes I always wear. A rag, a little bit of Kiwi polish … These shoes have five year’s wear on them. Ninety dollar shoes. I bought them for thirty-four-fifty.”

  “Then you should have two pairs,” Amanda said. “I think the warranty’s about shot on this one.” Her voice was icy, as if she had tried to throw a little oil on water, but he wouldn’t quit stirring it up. She put her glasses back on, the argument just about over. “Look at the soles.”


  He turned them upside down, exposing a half-dollar size hole in the bottom of one of the shoes. “What?” he said “we’re going to be praying next Saturday night? You think I’m going to be crawling around on my hands and knees? What I’m going to do, by the way, is take these down to the shoe repair. For ten bucks Le Wing tacks on a new sole. Bingo, they’ve got another five year’s wear in them. I might never buy a new pair.”

  “What you don’t know,” she said, letting up on him suddenly, “is how handsome you look when you’re all dressed up. You look just like Fred Astaire. I mean it. If you’d pay some attention to yourself sometimes you’d notice the kind of looks you get from women when you put on the dog just a little.”

  “You know what I think?” he said. “I think that’s just vanity, and I for one am going to do without it.”

  “You know what I think?” she asked evenly.

  “What?”

  “I think those shoes make you look like a bum. They’re an embarrassment.”

  “I embarrass you, eh? Is that it? I’m an embarrassment?”

  “We’re talking about your shoes.”

  “We were talking about your shoes, actually. Although you’re right—somehow I’m the one who ended up being insulted. Why is that? How come I turn out to be the injured party?”

  “Are you the injured party?

  “Forget it,” he said. “Just forget it. I wake up on what’s probably the nicest day in the year and by eight o’clock it’s wrecked.”

  Amanda said nothing. She had picked up her book and was reading it, or pretending to. He knew it was over. Somehow they’d had a fight over the shoes, and like all such fights it came down to nothing but hard feelings. “I’m going down to the hardware store,” he said, looking at the floor. “Be back in half an hour.”

  She was silent. He realized that she was really ticked off. It was true that the blue shoes, now that he thought about it, would go pretty nicely with the dress he’d bought her. The vanity comment had been insulting, too. There had been no call for that. “I’ll start the coffee,” he said.

  She had turned a page in her book, still saying nothing. She wouldn’t cut him any kind of slack. He was very nearly apologizing by offering to make coffee, but she wouldn’t go for it. As usual, she’d let him stew for awhile. Then he could apologize again, more explicitly, beg her forgiveness, and she could be magnanimous and give in.

  Fuming again, he went back downstairs and out the front door, neglecting the coffee pot. He climbed into the car and started the engine, racing the motor to warm it up. He caught his reflection in the rearview mirror and smoothed down his hair, turning his face so that his cheekbones were accentuated by shadow, trying to find Fred Astaire in there someplace. He gave up. To hell with counting calories. No one would appreciate it anyway except those mythical women who goggled at him when he wore the right pair of shoes. A husband was a solitary creature in the end, and he was a fool to think he could please anyone but himself.

  He drove off, rolling the stop sign at the end of the street, and in a couple of minutes he was at the doughnut shop. There were a number of cars in the parking lot now, and people standing on the sidewalk, waiting for Lew to unlock the door. Walt climbed out of the car and hurried across the lot to join them.

  The selection, he decided, just wasn’t up to par. There were no strawberry doughnuts at all. Not that he was a strawberry doughnut man more than once a month, but he hated to see a diminished selection like that. There were no maple-frosted cake doughnuts, either, just maple bars, which tended to be too much of a good thing. Half-size bars would be a hell of an innovation. He ought to mention all this to Lew, but he knew he wouldn’t. His desire to talk doughnuts had fled. He’d buy a couple of glazed and get out of there.

  The guy in front of him, it turned out, was buying a cartload of doughnuts to take to work—twelve dozen in all. Lew offered to throw in another dozen free, and the man took him up on it. Before he was done he had wiped out the glazed doughnuts entirely, every damned last one. Walt nearly hit him.

  For a moment he considered flat out asking him to leave a couple, but then he decided that maybe Lew had a rack of them cooling in the back room. Glazed doughnuts were big movers; there was always another rack waiting. Better to take a chance on that than to start begging. It hadn’t come to that yet. And he could always shift to crumb doughnuts, too, and go with glazed tomorrow morning. And the morning after that.

  He drove home with a box of glazed after all—not fresh, but day-olds, what he’d seen on the rack early in the morning. Lew had given him a break on the price, sold him a full dozen for a dollar and threw in a couple of jellies to boot. You couldn’t beat that—less than eight cents apiece. What was that ad where you could feed a kid for a month on thirty bucks? Hell, they could eat doughnuts till the cows came home for half that.

  When he got home he took the doughnuts into the garage. There was no use starting any trouble. Amanda wasn’t in the mood for it. He put the box on the bench. The two crumb doughnuts he’d eaten in the car hadn’t quite been enough, so he polished off two of the glazed while he fiddled around, hauling odds and ends from the big barrel of junk parts, letting his mind run on the prototype.

  There was nothing at all wrong, he decided, with day-old glazed. All in all there were two classes of glazed doughnut—the big, airy kind popularized in Asian-owned doughnut shops, and the traditional flattened glazed that was almost crispy and was heavy with sugar. There were plenty of people who would argue with him, but he didn’t go much for the airy kind. There was something faddish about them, something pretentious. Lew had pretty much the same notion, and the slightly stale quality of the day-olds in the box, Walt was pleased to find, actually accentuated what it was about a glazed that made it, as Lew had so eloquently put it, the true quill.

  He ate half of a third doughnut, but then suddenly felt sick, and he threw the remaining half into the trash. Eleven doughnuts left. He wondered if he could freeze them with any success at all in order to have a source when times were tough, like this morning. Amanda would find them though. Better to leave them in the garage.

  He went out into the backyard and started hammering away at the greenhouse, and in about a half hour Amanda came out with a cup of coffee for him.

  “You can be such a yo-yo,” she said, smiling at him. He felt like a creep.

  “Fred Astaire,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “I meant that.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the device I’ve figured out to shade the greenhouse,” he said, happier now. “All automatic. We can put in a switch and work it from inside the house. Let me show you what I’ve got in mind.” Together they walked toward the garage. Then Walt remembered the box of doughnuts lying in plain sight on the bench. “Tell you what,” he said, stopping abruptly “Let me put it together for you—a prototype. It wouldn’t mean anything now anyway.” He smiled at her and she shrugged.

  “Whatever you say,” she said. “I’m going to run down to the nursery for potting soil and bedding plants. Want to go along?”

  “Naw.” He waved the idea away. “I’m wasting daylight. You go ahead and buy mulch, or whatever it is. I’ll stay here.”

  •

  He worked for hours, as if work were a curtain he could draw across the morning’s mistakes. Amanda came and went, visiting nurseries, hauling flats of plants in from the trunk of her car. Walt wondered idly, more than once, if she was stopping at the mall when she was out, if shoe stores drew her as irresistibly as doughnut shops drew him. Shoes! He was damned if he was going to worry about something as insignificant as a shoe sole. Life was too full of authentic horrors.

  Now and then he fetched tools out of the garage, but he avoided looking at the box on the bench. It made him uneasy, like a cocked gun, and at one point he considered just facing up to it, going in there and slamming it to pieces with a two-by-four and pitching it into the trash. That was crazy, though. It was just doughnuts. He put the thought out of his
mind and went to work, cutting up redwood boards for window jambs.

  But he found himself daydreaming about the box, picturing it there in the dark garage among the wood shavings and used slips of sandpaper. Suddenly he had a vision of himself dead, the long, unnumbered years passing away. Dust settled over the workbench and floor of the garage, covering the tools and scraps of wood in a gray layer as the dying sun turned in a red sky The mummified doughnuts lay there stiff and dry in their cardboard sarcophagus, painted with the fading doughnut logo from Lew’s All-Niter.

  He felt suddenly weak. He realized that his hands were shaking so badly that he could hardly hold the hammer, and his head ached to beat the band. He turned on the garden hose and drank as much water as he could hold, and felt temporarily better. Going without lunch was what did it. You couldn’t eat sugar for breakfast and then try to get by on coffee for the rest of the day. Sooner or later you came down hard from that load of sugar. What in the hell had he been thinking about? He had very nearly had the D.T.’s there for a minute.

  What he needed, he decided suddenly, was a hair of the dog. The idea was highly amusing. If nothing else, it would stop these abominable shakes. And anyway, eleven doughnuts lay there in a box on the bench, and there was no excuse for that if he didn’t eat them—or at least one or two. It was largely a matter of economics. The day-olds had been a damned good buy, or would be if he ate them. If he let them petrify, though, they were money down a rat hole. He was reminded instantly of Amanda and her half-price shoes. The difference was that he was going to eat the doughnuts, whereas Amanda would wear the shoes maybe once or twice and then lose them in the salad of shoes cluttering the closet floor.

  And he had already binged that morning anyway; there was no use forming resolutions now. Tomorrow morning he would pack it in, give it up for good. In fact, he would announce it to Amanda, and that would cement it. That was a hell of a serious step, that kind of self-revelation in front of your wife. You couldn’t back away after that.