Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (2 page)

Oh, wait, I had to change my post office box because someone saw me there today and I’ve told you how people talk here, so I’ll have to drive into Kearney to get your next letter. Here is the new box number
.

He wrote a nine-digit number quickly, without referring to any of the papers in front of him. Then he signed it:

Hope to see you soon
,
Philip

“Oh, boy,” he said. He crossed out
Philip
and wrote
Phillip
.

The Farm Boy leaned back and read the letter out loud and then reached for a clean sheet of paper to copy it over.

He lifted something, a small white paperweight, from the white rectangular stack before he took a sheet, and then he replaced it, dead-center. The paperweight was a human finger, boiled to the bone.

“If he can see the future,” I asked, “why does he need me?”

“He doesn’t think he needs anything,” the young man on my couch said with exaggerated patience. His calm was a cracked shell he was trying to hold together from the inside. “That’s why I’m here.”

Beneath the baggy expensive clothes, the young man on my couch, who had identified himself as Christopher Nordine, was the kind of thin you don’t want to be. I could have closed my fingers around his wrists, and his knuckles bulged like walnuts beneath the pale, papery skin of his hands.

“I don’t understand,” I said, giving patience back. “You just want me to talk to him?”

A hand went to his slicked-back brown hair, touched it, and then left it alone. “Well, he won’t listen to
me
. We’ve been fighting night and day.”

“About something he should be able to see in the future.”

He made a soft sound, like
“peh,”
dismissing the future. “Maybe he’s right,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t need anything.”

Nordine lifted his hands slowly, as though the gesture hurt the muscles in his back, and rubbed long bony fingers over his eyelids. “Let’s say he is,” he said from behind his fingers. “Still, it’ll make me feel better.”

He’d placed a bottle of Evian water on the table—my table, in my living room—and he took his hands from his face and raised the bottle to drink. The October heat was beating its wings against the uninsulated walls of my little wooden house in Topanga Canyon, and the temperature indoors had to be ninety-five, although Christopher seemed to have cooled it somewhat. The growing stack of very odd mail on the table—mail sent to me by dozens of companies whose computers had inexplicably decided I was about to be married—was curling at the corners. A bright brochure advertising HONEYMOON HEAVEN had slipped limply to the floor, belly-up, and gone flat. Even the rug was hot underfoot.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take off your jacket?” I was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, and I was pouring.

“It’s wool,” he said, giving it a tug. “It breathes.”

“I’d have to hear that from a sheep. It looks hotter than hell to me.”

“I haven’t been hot in more than a year. I’m too skinny to get hot.”

I didn’t say anything.

He shook the bottle—only an inch or so left—and looked irritated. “So,” he said, gathering his calm around him again, “will you do it? I’ll pay you five hundred.”

“Money’s not the issue. And if it were, it’d be because five hundred is too much.”

“You don’t know Max,” he said. Christopher Nordine looked to be in his middle thirties, with thinning straight coffee-brown hair and odd pale eyes that had heavy rings under them. There was a crustiness over the skin of his eyelids, as though he hadn’t washed them when he woke up. His eyes, oddly deep set and restless, skimmed the room, my face, the room again, failing to find anything to hold them. He had a high-ridged, narrow nose and a sharp, wide mouth. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the whiskers had come in patchily, heavy at the tip of his cleft chin and lighter on his cheeks. Some sort of heavy cologne rolled off him in waves. Thirty pounds ago, he would have been handsome.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “More water?”

His sparse eyebrows went up inquiringly. “Have you got Evian?”

“I’ve got more Evian than the source,” I said. “Someone brought me three cases of it.”

“He must be fond of you.”

“It’s a she,” I said, “and the fondness comes and goes.”

“Ah.” He didn’t sound very interested. “And whose fault is that?”

When I don’t expect a question, I’m usually stranded with the truth. “Mine.”

“I know all about that,” Nordine said with sudden bitterness. “I could write the book.”

“ ‘The Book of Love,’ maybe. Remember that?” I got up and went to the kitchen, a depressingly short walk, and threw open a cabinet. I had half a loaf of stale bread, two dusty cans of tuna, and thirty-six bottles of Evian, courtesy of my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, who had recently been trying to get me healthy. Again. “ ‘Chapter One says you love her, love her with all your heart.’ ”

“ ‘Chapter Two, you break up,’ ” Christopher Nordine sang with perfect pitch, “ ‘but you give him just one more start.’ ”

“I don’t think that’s it,” I said, toting a full bottle back into the living room and trying to stay upwind of myself. I needed a shower. He took the bottle eagerly.

“I hate oldies anyway. I’m getting to be too much of an oldie myself.” He drank.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re what, thirty-three, thirty-four?”

He took the bottle from his lips and smiled, not a pleasant smile. “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

As hot as it was, I could still feel my face burn. “Oh,” I said.

“Twenty-seven, going on dead,” he said.

It was terrible, and it was probably true, but it was also self-consciously dramatic, and I realized that one of the reasons I was resisting Christopher Nordine was that I didn’t like him very much. But it wasn’t the only reason.

“I still don’t really understand what you want me to do.”

His eyes gleamed, and I saw what was wrong with them; he’d lost the fat that cushioned the eyeballs, and they’d sunk back into his head, too far back for normal eyes, where they glittered like water down a well. He was burning his own body for fuel.

“I live with the man,” he said fiercely. “He’s seventy-seven years old, and he’s living like a fool. He’s going to get himself hurt or killed.”

“Living like a fool,” I repeated.

“Picking up street boys and taking them in. Haunting AA meetings and adopting heroin addicts. Turning the house into the gay
pound
or something. They get food and clothes and, and support, and clean sheets, and he doesn’t really care if they steal his stuff. He sleeps with them in the
house
, for God’s sake. And he fights with me when I try to tell him he’s going to get hurt some day.”

“Maybe he likes heroin addicts,” I said. “You know, they sit still. They’re like furniture most of the time, not much trouble as long as they can—

“They’re trash,” he said, and he said it in two syllables: “trayush.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the extrasyllabic extravagance of the South in his speech. “He thinks he can save them. He thinks he can”—he lifted the bottle to his lips again and drank, the knobby Adam’s apple bobbing up and down—“save everybody.”

What the hell. “And you’re jealous.”

He threw me a scornful look over the edge of the bottle. “Give me a break,” he said. “I’m the only one he loves. He’s already told me that I’ll inherit everything.”

“But he won’t listen to you. Why?”

“He’s
seventy-seven
. He won’t listen to anybody.”

“But if he knows it pains you—”

“You bet it pains me. He takes them in, he pours money over their dirty little heads, he tries to get them off the dope, find them jobs, give them a future. They take his credit cards, they use his ATM cards for booze and drugs. They steal his jewelry, his furniture, and when they’ve gotten everything they can, they split. They rob him blind. They break his heart.”

It was actorish, but the rage behind it was real. I cleared some of my extremely peculiar mail away from the middle of the table to make room for him to put down the bottle and to let a few neutral moments ground the electrical charge in the room. “Hearts aren’t that breakable.”

“There are hearts and hearts,” he said, drinking. He put the bottle on the table and picked up a flyer. INSURE YOUR LOVE, it suggested in magenta letters.

“Seventy-seven’s old for you,” I said neutrally.

He raised his eyes from the flier, sat back on the couch, and gave me the cave-dwelling stare. The suppressed rage blossomed behind it, like a campfire. “And?”

“And you’re the legatee.”

“I… already… told… you… that,” he said, coming to a complete stop at the end of each word. “Twice.”

“And they’re bleeding the estate.”

“You’re an asshole,” he said. He started to rise.

“Sit down,” I said.

He ignored me, working on getting to his feet. He seemed to have to test each joint individually to make sure it still worked. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I haven’t got time for it. I offered you five hundred dollars—”

“Which is about three hundred too much.”

“
Fuck
the money,” he snapped, standing. “I came here because I’m frightened. I’m scared for him. And you think—”

“So convince me otherwise.” I was still in my chair.

He started to pace. “What do you think I’m going to do? Take the money and live happily ever after? Finance a new career? Start
over
somewhere?” He waved an arm, and the flyer skittered out of his hand like an aeronautically challenged paper plane and crash-landed on my dreadful carpet. “Who do you think you’re talking to, Methuselah?”

“Okay, then tell me what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m afraid one of them is going to
kill
him, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“But,” I said, just trying it on, “he can see the future.”

“Yeah, sure. About everyone but himself. The first time he saw me, he knew I was sick. He knew it before I did, but about him, he doesn’t know whether the paper will come in the morning.”

“And he took you in,” I said, “knowing.”

He started to say something and then he blinked rapidly and turned it into a long exhalation. “He took me in,” he said.

“And you.”

“I love him.” There was nothing dramatic about it.

I loved somebody, too, but Christopher was apparently better at it than I was. “I don’t know what you think I can do,” I said, “but I’ll go see him.”

“You’re the boy Christy sent.” Max Grover looked down at me through the screen door.

“That’s me,” I said, junking my mental image of the man Christy wanted to protect. I hadn’t figured he’d be six feet six or something, nor had I expected the trimmed, cloud-white beard and sky-blue eyes, a color scheme he was keeping intact by wearing a loose, long blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and creased, spotless white trousers. He was tanned, broad-shouldered, and barefoot, and he had one long brown hand wrapped around a large lemon.

“I must say, you don’t look very dangerous.” The eyes were not a fool’s eyes. They were, if anything, amused.

“Yeah, well you’re not what I imagined, either.”

“A psychic should be more… elfin,” he suggested, watching me. “Small-boned and bigheaded, like the aliens people keep showing pictures of to Robert Stack.” He snapped the screen with his forefinger, making a little cloud of dust. “Are you disappointed?”

“I’m not much of anything,” I said.

He closed his eyelids for a moment and then reopened them and peered at me a little more closely. The amusement had dipped beneath the blue surface. “The danger is there, though,” he said. “It runs through your veins, like a heavier blood. I wonder what brings it to the surface.”

This was not going as I’d planned.

He must have seen something in my face, because he said, “Control is an illusion. You must know that by now.”

“I gave up on control years ago. Now I settle for not being bewildered.”

“Can I help?” It was a serious question.

A car passed behind me on the street, Flores Street in West Hollywood, dragging a wake of heat behind it. “Well, you can tell me why you have a lemon in your hand.”

He looked down at it and then showed me a row of straight teeth that looked white even in the white beard. “Come in,” he said. “Have some lemonade.”

He led me through a perfectly restored craftsman’s bungalow, circa 1918—high ceilings, white walls, bleached oak floors, and broad arches leading from one room to another. I’d once heard a real-estate agent say that a house had “flow.” Max Grover’s house flowed like the Mississippi.

I waited in a small book-lined room while he squeezed lemons in the kitchen. He’d never laid eyes on me before, but he trusted me alone in his house. A cut-crystal bowl filled with antique roses scented the room, Mozart’s concerto for flute and harpsichord cooled the air, and I indulged a private vice: I absolutely cannot be left in someone’s library without checking out the titles. Max Grover had assembled a serious trove of religion and metaphysics: three biographies of the Buddha, a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
The Book of Urantia
, whatever that was, the complete guesses of Edgar Cayce, several feet of baseless speculation on the pyramids, Robin Lane Fox debunking the Bible, a well-thumbed copy of
The Book of Mormon
, and at least two thousand more. I was leafing through Doré’s illustrations of Dante, hunting for the popes in hell, when Max said: “Here we are, then. Find anything you like?”

I turned. “Robin Lane Fox, in a pinch.”

“A cynic. But you’d have to be, wouldn’t you? With your job.” He was carrying a white wicker tray with two tall glasses of lemonade on it.

“But which came first?” I asked. “The cynicism or the job?” I didn’t get many chances to talk to psychics. Especially not for free.

“Our primary characteristics preexist us,” he said, as matter-of-factly as someone else might have said, “Hot, isn’t it?” and lowered the tray on a small wooden table. “But you’re the kind of cynic who develops it late in life, who grows—or rather, shrinks—into it. The
better
kind of cynic.”