The Paper Grail (31 page)

“Mrs. Deventer,” Uncle Roy said, “meet Brainiac, the man from Mars.”

“Charmed,” she said, reaching her hand out toward Howard. “Welcome to planet earth.”

“Wait,” Uncle Roy said, pretending to be confounded, and then both of them, Uncle Roy and Mrs. Deventer, laughed and laughed. “You’ve heard me talk about Mrs. Deventer, Howard.”

“Yes indeed,” Howard said, remembering. She was the one being squeezed by Mrs. Lamey. Somehow she didn’t look like a very formidable opponent.

“I’ve brought these cookies for all of you.” Mrs. Deventer produced a sandwich bag full of cookies from the purse around her shoulder. “Leave some for the children,” she said to Roy, and nodded toward Howard and Sylvia. Then to Sylvia she said, “Is this one yours?”

Sylvia blushed just a little bit. “Stray cat,” she said.

Mrs. Deventer cast Howard a coy smile. “Pleased.” She shook his hand again.

It struck Howard that Mrs. Deventer wasn’t anywhere near sober. She wasn’t falling down, but she wasn’t steady, either.

“My young man is taking me out,” she said happily.

The statement had a freezing effect on Sylvia and Uncle Roy both.

“Now, don’t start in,” she said. “He’s pretty nearly saved me from ruin.” She directed this at Howard, as if to assure him that the opinions of Uncle Roy and Sylvia weren’t worth very much. “They’d have the place by now if it weren’t for him, and you know it.” Her nearly giddy attitude had switched to something near anger. Howard was clearly the only disinterested party in the room. “He’s a godsend,” she said to him.

“Good for him,” Howard said, humoring her.

“Paid my taxes.”

“Good man,” said Howard.

“He’s wealthy, you know. Pays my mortgage, too, when I can’t afford it. He’s looking out for me.”

Uncle Roy looked about to burst, but he kept quiet for another moment, for as long as he could, maybe, while he systematically chopped the latest pumpkin into cubes. “That would be our friend Mr. Stoat,” he said to Howard, not looking up.

Howard nodded, dumbfounded. Mrs. Deventer was grinning again, though, at the mention of the name of her “young man.” Here was trouble. Howard wondered if Uncle Roy knew just how much trouble. Paying her mortgage and taxes?

She turned to leave, slightly miffed, Howard thought, as if she had expected enthusiasm and gotten doubts instead. “I’ll just be on my way, then.”

Howard walked with her toward the door, wanting to be gallant, thinking it best to win her favor in some little way. “Thanks for the lemonade,” he said. “It was a pleasure meeting you. Live near here?”

“Right up on Dawson,” she said, bumping into the skeleton, which swayed back and forth like a tired pendulum. Outside stood an old two-tone Pontiac, pink and gray, looking as though it had just been waxed. It was gorgeous, not a scratch on it, except for the rear bumper, which was smashed in. “Roy Barton is a good man, but he gets the most amazing ideas sometimes.”

“Well,” said Howard diplomatically, “he wouldn’t be Roy Barton otherwise, would he? He’s pretty fond of you, you know. He’s told me quite a bit about you.”

“Has he?” she asked, sounding pleased.

“Beautiful car.” Howard opened the door for her.

“My poor old Bob bought it back in fifty-six,” she said, her voice growing instantly husky. “God rest his soul. I don’t take it out much. Just once a month, up to Willits to visit my sister. There isn’t even ten thousand miles on it.”

“Wow.” Howard ran his hand across the clean pink paint. “Take care of it.” He was vaguely conscious of a telephone ringing nearby, over and over again. Mrs. Deventer nodded, telling Howard through the open window that he was a good boy and looking about half wistful. She made several efforts to shove the key into the ignition, banging it on either side of the keyhole before sliding it in finally and starting the car. It died
almost at once and then wouldn’t start. There was the smell of gasoline as she pumped the accelerator. The telephone rang off the hook and then suddenly stopped.

“It’s flooded,” Howard shouted. She had rolled her window up, though, and she smiled at him and said something that he couldn’t hear. Mashing the accelerator to the floorboard, she twisted the key again, holding it on until the motor roared into life and a cloud of dark exhaust blew out of the tail pipe. She backed out quickly, swerving in the gravel, and then rocketed up the hill past a startled man in an apron just then coming out of the back of the Cap’n England.

Howard turned to walk back into the haunted house, working the Mrs. Deventer problem over in his mind. “Hey,” shouted someone from behind, and Howard looked back to see the aproned man hurrying toward him. “Roy Barton inside?” he asked, out of breath.

“Sure is,” said Howard. “What’s wrong?”

“Phone call. Artemis Jimmers. There’s been trouble; he’s pretty well worked up.”

“Thanks,” Howard said over his shoulder. He was in through the door in a second, shouting for Uncle Roy, who was up and past him, hurrying out into the night. Howard and Sylvia followed along behind.

The pay phone hung on the rear of the restaurant, the empty black cover of a telephone directory dangling against the yellow stucco beneath it. A moth the size of a small bird fluttered wildly around the light overhead.

“Yeah,” Uncle Roy said into the mouthpiece. “What the hell?” He listened for a moment, his eyes narrowing. “You’re completely over the edge,” he said, raising his voice. “You’re just exactly the nut I always said you were. That’s right. You, too. I wouldn’t touch your goddamn shed with a dung fork. Oh, yeah, well …” He stopped talking suddenly and looked at the silent telephone. Then he listened again and hung up furiously.

“What on earth is it?” Sylvia asked. “What’s happened?”

“Somebody’s stole his shed.”

“His tin shed?” Howard asked, finding it hard to believe.
“Stole
it?”

“The whole megillah, lock, stock, and barrel. Jacked it up, slid it onto a truck, and drove off with it. Jimmers got a phone call luring him down to Point Arena. He thinks I put someone up to it. Anyway, he figured out it was a fake call, turned around to
head back, and blew out a tire a quarter mile from home. When he pulled in they were just taking off down the highway. He followed them for a mile on the flat. Tore the tire to pieces, apparently. Turned the tube into a sausage, it got so hot. They left him in the dust, of course. Now he wants the shed back along with a new tire. He thinks it was me.”

“Why would he think it was you?” Howard asked.

“Because they were driving Bennet’s truck.”

18

G
RAHAM
didn’t sleep much anymore. Sleep didn’t come easy to him, and there didn’t seem to be any great need of it, anyway. The hours of darkness dragged along. He couldn’t fish at night. Getting down the hill to the pond was treacherous enough in daylight. A couple of times he had sat in his chair on the front porch in the middle of the night, watching the moon rise over the trees. But it was cold, and the cold tired him out these days. Sometimes at night he read—the Bible, mostly, a large-print edition he’d had to switch to a few years back.

How many years? He couldn’t remember now. The years ran together like watercolor paints, and his memories surfaced in confused order, some days clear, some days dull. Most often at night he simply lay awake, letting his mind drift. In the morning either Edith or Sylvia would arrive with his breakfast and coffee. Midmorning he would work his garden, which, although it was new, seemed to be blighted somehow. He had his suspicions, but there was little he could do about it except work. There wasn’t a lot of sun out in the forest there, especially not in the fall. But the cabin and garden were in a clearing, and he ought to have had some luck with leafy things, with lettuce and cabbage, even though there wasn’t enough of the season left for the vegetables to mature. In a month it would be too cold.

But this trouble wasn’t weather; it was some kind of rot that came up through the soil, which seemed always to be dry, no matter how often he watered it. Nothing at all had grown well
for him for a couple of years now. He had expected most of this. He knew it would be so at the end—all the dust and the dying. It was the strange blight, the rot, the tainting and withering of the leaves that he wondered about. They had a bad smell to them, too, even while they were still mostly green.

This morning in particular he felt heavy and tired. He had awakened twice in the night with chest pains, but they’d subsided now. He had found himself awake a third time. He was out of doors, standing in the moonlit garden and wearing his long underwear and his hat. He couldn’t remember having gotten out of bed. The dark woods stretched away on all sides, and in the clearing overhead the stars shined thick and bright like a thousand promises. He had his walking stick with him, and with it he was drawing wavy-edged circles in the dirt, like clouds in the sky.

He was filled with the vague notion that he had been dreaming the whole time he was sketching with the stick—a dream about salmon schooling in deep ocean water. And one of the fish, responding to some sort of deep and primitive calling, had turned landward, swimming lazily toward the river mouth where Graham had sat fishing with his pole and line. Someone had stood behind him in the dream, watching his back—a shadowy presence that had begun to fade, along with the dream itself, almost as soon as he hooked his fish.

I
T
was just after three
A.M.
The living room clock had tolled, and in another hour Uncle Roy would be in to wake him. It wasn’t just the looming adventure of stealing back Mr. Jimmers’ shed that kept Howard awake. He sometimes worried about small things in the early morning—unpaid bills, long-avoided errands, elusive rice paper sketches which were pretty clearly not what they appeared to be. At home he got around the problem of insomnia by moving out to the living room couch—the change alone was usually enough to put him back to sleep. But he couldn’t do that here. It would imply that his bed wasn’t comfortable, and Aunt Edith would worry herself ragged over it.

The bed wasn’t worth a damn, though. It sagged in the middle, and if Howard slept on his stomach for more than two minutes, he woke up in the morning with a backache that threatened to keep him in a chair. He lay on the very edge now, where the rail of the bed frame stiffened the mattress a little, and thought of all the things that he ought to be doing with his time but wasn’t. Tomorrow he would clean up the rest of that pile of barn lumber,
maybe steal a half dozen slats to throw under his mattress.

He had meant to be on vacation here, to sort things out, to discover whether his feelings for Sylvia had changed any. Well, they hadn’t. That much was clear. It had taken him exactly two days to go nuts over her. Meanwhile she pretty clearly had found in him another man who needed looking after, like Uncle Roy—a slightly daft brother who had appeared out of the south, unable to keep out of trouble. And if he did stay in Fort Bragg, if he didn’t return to his job at the museum, what would he do? He could move in with Uncle Roy, of course, and be a burden. When his money was gone, he could hustle food stamps, maybe get a job at the mill and get laid off in the rainy season.

The thought of going home left him empty, though. There wasn’t a single thing to entice him back down to southern California except a scattering of friends, who seemed to be more scattered with each succeeding year. His coming north had cut some sort of mooring line, and he was drifting. It was time to put on some sail, to break out the compass and the charts. He looked at the clock for the tenth time. It wasn’t even three-fifteen. The big old house was cold, and he pulled the blankets up around his neck and listened to the wind.

He began counting backward from one hundred. Sheep were too complicated. After a while his troubles scurried off to the back of his mind, where they winked and waved at him, not quite out of sight. He could see them back there in the shadows, as dream images now, and his counting backward faltered at around forty-five. He started again, but soon slowed and then stopped, and he found himself dreaming about a ship that had gone aground on a rocky shore. He was on the beach, ankle-deep in the rising tide, thinking that there was something on board that he needed or that he wanted. He was a castaway, thinking to salvage rope and timber and live chickens from the staved-in ship. He turned and faced the shore, and above him on the cliff top was the stone house, dark but for a single light in the attic window.

He could see the silhouette of someone sitting in one of the Morris chairs, reading a book, and he knew all at once that it was him, at home there, whiling away a peaceful evening, impossibly content. A dream wind blew off the ocean, into the dark mouth of the passage beneath the cliffs, and when he turned around again to face the sea, there was no longer a ship on the rocks but the old Studebaker instead, a ruined hulk sitting just above the tide.

He clambered across the rocks toward it, his pant legs rolled to the knees, the ocean neither cold nor warm nor even particularly wet. The car’s door hung open, its top hinge broken, the musty upholstery smelling of seaweed and barnacles. He climbed in behind the wheel, grasping the Lucite steering wheel knob and thinking that if only he had a chart he would pilot the car out through the scattered reefs and into the open sea.