The Paper Grail (34 page)

“I said that I’m prepared to take it. I’ve readied myself.”

“Take what?” he asked, trying to look puzzled.

She said something, but he didn’t hear her because his throat suddenly was full of stuff, and he hacked up a clot of phlegm and spit it onto the grass, shaking his head tiredly and catching his breath. After a minute he could talk again. “What?” he asked, pretending to be confused.

She stared at him, clearly horrified, either at all the coughing and spitting or at his seeming failure to understand her. “I said that I’ve prepared myself,” she said slowly, enunciating each syllable roundly and loudly, like a person trying to force English into the head of a foreigner.

“How? For what?”

“I’ve had an operation. I’m infertile now. There was a secondary infection that affected my hip joint. It won’t heal. I know what you know, Michael, and I’ve cultivated certain powers. I’m a vessel now, waiting to be filled.”

“The garden,” he said. “I don’t know why you bothered to blight it. It’s part of the process, anyway, all the drought and the dying. Why do you try so hard to help it along? Why don’t you simply let it alone to run its course?”

“There’s no profit in letting things run their course. That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m talking about here. I’m prepared to take up the burden, to relieve you of it. You’re dying. You know that, don’t you? And when you die, there will have to be someone else. The Grail is rightfully mine. We’re of the same flesh and blood. You have no more right to it than I have, and you know it. It was selfishness, your keeping it hidden all these years when it might have been put to use.”

Explaining things to her was futile. She heard what she wanted to hear, what her mind was long ago made up to. He would try, anyway, briefly. “The Grail, is it? Don’t be so confounded specific. It’s not meant to be ‘put to use.’ The world is full of things that aren’t
useful
, Heloise.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

He looked at her. Talking to her was like shouting into a hole. Your words evaporated. “I’m not sure what it is, and neither are you. There’s danger in that. It’s meant to be
kept
, not used. It’s … what? A scrap of paper that someone folded into a cup and caught some blood in. If I had it my way, he never would have brought it back from the East. It’s a Pandora’s box, and all you can think about is to tear the lid off it.”

He began to wheeze. Long speeches took it out of him. He closed his eyes and stayed as still as he could, trying to relax so that he could catch his breath. It came finally, along with another jab of pain which he tried to keep from showing on his face. After a time he opened his eyes and saw the growing impatience on her face. She had been listening hard, waiting for some scrap of information that she could bank on. There must be something in this old man that I can
use
, her face seemed to say, that I can profit from.

“Was it the reason for John Ruskin’s impotence?” she asked.

He shrugged and gave his fishing pole a tug. His hook was stuck in something, as usual. People had thrown junk into the pond for years. Trees had fallen across it. There was no telling what was down there, except that it wasn’t a fish. He pulled harder, managing only to set the hook tighter.

“And you. You’ve had no children. Why? You’ve lived like a monk.”

“I was never suited to be a family man.”

She looked at him skeptically, implying that he wasn’t being honest with her, that she saw right through him. “What I believe,” she said, “is that it was Ruskin’s impotence that made him a Fisher King. The Grail fell into his hands, and—”

“What
Grail
? You’re literal-minded to the point of insanity, Heloise. You’ve driven yourself crazy, finally, with all your grasping and clutching. There’s only a sheet of paper …”

“I don’t care what it is. Hear me out. Ruskin had all the necessary tools. He was a natural, and the task simply fell to him.” She looked out over the water, thinking hard, animated by her ideas.

“You’re a born fool, Heloise. You can’t see the forest.”

“It’s you that can’t see.”

“It doesn’t matter what I see. I’ve spent my time building up my house. That’s what the Scriptures advise.”

“The Scriptures! To you it doesn’t matter. You’ve wasted everything. You have no future. I do, though. I have the whole
world within my reach, and I’m warning you right now—”

“Wait,” he said, finally tired of her talk. He pulled on his fishing pole again. Whatever the hook had caught on was moving. Slowly he reeled it in, the trout pole bending almost double. It might just conceivably be an immense catfish—a lazy beast that had lain on the bottom of the pond for years. Heloise Lamey watched, her face expressionless, humoring him, waiting him out. A dark shadow rose toward the surface, and a cloud of mud and waterweeds churned up around it. It was a rubber boot, a knee-high sort of Wellington, rotted and covered with black mud and slime. He hauled it dripping onto the bank.

He turned toward her, blinking as if mystified. “It’s a boot,” he said. “A rubber boot.” He chuckled at the idea.

“I can see that it’s a
boot
,” she hissed, going pale with exasperation and urgency. “Listen, old man. What I’m telling you is this. The world and the future are mine. You can stand in my way as long as you’re alive, but your paltry little army of so-called friends cannot. When you’re dead, there’ll be a very brief and nasty conflict, I can promise you, and your friends will suffer needlessly. I don’t give a tinker’s damn what it is—a piece of paper or a golden cup. I’m destined to have it, I tell you. And it’s your own obstinacy and foolishness that prevents it … for the moment. If you would do your friends a favor, give it to me now.”

He wasn’t indifferent to what she said. She might even be right. But it changed nothing. By way of answering, he unhooked his hearing aid entirely and threw it into the pond. Then, laboriously and without looking at her again, he wiggled the hook out of the toe of the boot, dropping the boot over the bow of the rowboat. He unscrewed the lid from the jar of salmon eggs and fiddled a couple out, baiting the hook again. He took his time about it. There was no rush. He was certain he wasn’t going anywhere, ever again.

He sat for a moment watching the water striders scurry back and forth across the water like ballerinas. There was a quacking overhead. The duck that had flown off had returned along with three friends, and they landed on the pond, paddling toward him curiously.

Graham poured a quarter of the jar of salmon eggs out onto his hand and scattered them on the water, the ducks scooping them up enthusiastically. He noticed then that there were rabbits on the grass of the hillside, and a pair of gray squirrels chattering in a fir tree overhead. He could see a doe and her fawn coming
along through the trees. A mole waddled down the hill past the rabbits.

Slowly, fighting the pain in his chest, he got up off the hard thwart and stepped over the side of the boat, onto the grass. He stumbled, falling forward and rolling over onto his back in order to look up through the trees at the sky. The forest was full of the sound of the world, ancient and wobbly and creaking toward the morning.

He remembered then that he had been talking to someone, but it seemed a long, long time ago, and the hillside was empty except for the mole and the rabbits. Whatever had been said meant nothing to him anymore. It was just wind now, sighing in the fir trees.

“S
HE’LL
pay for the damned thing,” Uncle Roy said. “Let your conscience take a rest.”

“Well, I still didn’t want to smash his car up. I didn’t see any other way, though. He just quit at the corner there. He knew he couldn’t chase me on foot, and it wouldn’t have made any sense for me to pretend to get stuck in another hole or something. What else could I do? I had to run it into the tree.”

“Hell, we were probably out of there by then. The whole job didn’t take a minute. We clipped the padlock off with the bolt cutters, fired up the truck, and got the hell out, shed and all. Nothing to it. It would have been a dead bore if you hadn’t wrecked the bastard’s car. There’s only one thing would have improved it—him being in it at the time, or in front of it, the dirty little creep.”

“Well …” Howard said.

“He starts shooting up the damned neighborhood! I didn’t expect that. That was bad news. Secrecy is paramount in this business, paramount. He nearly tore the lid off the whole thing. The boys down at the mill worked him over pretty good, though. When the cops came, they said they thought
he
was the bad ass, waving his gun like that. Gave them a bogus description of you, and the cops tore around the yard for a half hour and then figured that you got out over the fence and headed down toward the airstrip. Fellow name of Dunbar who works out there saw you climb over. He swore to it. Somehow he gave out the same description of you that MacDonald and his boys did—short, overweight, baggy pants, and work boots. Two or three of them noticed you were missing two fingers on your right hand.”

Uncle Roy grinned, obviously happy with himself. If ever there was a campaign run successfully, this had been it, all except the shooting and Howard’s getting hurt. Uncle Roy had a sort of underground army of loyalists around Fort Bragg. Howard had clearly seen only the tip of the iceberg that morning, and the respect he had for his uncle had increased. Jimmers’ tin shed was safe down by the harbor, locked in the back of the old icehouse.

Apart from Mrs. Lamey and her confederates, the only person who would suspect it was there was Jimmers himself, probably, and Howard had already found out that he wasn’t the sort to call in the police. There could be no doubt that he would make his move to fetch it back, but it would come from some unguessable direction. And the harbor was a sort of enclave of Uncle Roy’s people. The dilapidated house trailers and shacks down there were tenanted largely by poor fishermen and cannery workers and welfare unemployed, many of them living on land owned by Mrs. Lamey and her associates. Coming in after the shed would be tricky even for Jimmers but would be doubly tricky for the enemy. Howard was half surprised that he had come to think of them as that—that he had fallen so completely under Uncle Roy’s sway.

After a moment’s silence Howard asked, “What was she doing here this morning, anyway? That was weird, her driving away just now when we were pulling up.”

Uncle Roy shrugged. “Watching the house. Harassment. Whatever. We’ve put a bee under her bonnet, or you have. This whole bottle of juice has started to ferment.”

“I figured she knew about us stealing back the shed, that she was waiting for us.”

“I don’t see how she could have. She probably came around looking for money, saw that the car was gone, and took off again. We just happened to be getting home at the same time, and when she saw us, the two of us together, she got cold feet and just kept on going. These landlord types are like that. They come round in the early morning, hoping to catch you in your pajamas when you’re naturally one down. They knock on loud enough for the neighbors to hear, thinking they’ll shame you. All you can do is ignore them.”

Howard nodded. That seemed reasonable enough. Something in him had been startled by the sight of Mrs. Lamey driving off at that hour of the morning, though, just when they were driving in. She hadn’t even glanced at them or slowed down.
Uncle Roy’s explanation of it didn’t quite wash. “If I had it to do over again,” Howard started to say as Uncle Roy stood up and moved off toward the kitchen, “I’d—”

“For now you could sit still,” Sylvia said, cutting him off. She pulled the Ace bandage tight around his knee and wrapped it half a dozen times. “I think this whole escapade was a lot of stupid nonsense, all over that damned machine.”

Uncle Roy had disappeared, out clanking coffee mugs around in the kitchen. Outside, the sun was barely up, still hiding behind the trees. In a half hour it would be another beautiful, dry autumn day. Howard watched Sylvia happily as she clipped the bandage in place. She wore a woolly sort of bathrobe with big pink flowers on it, and her hair was a sleepy mess, falling half in front of her face. She had pretended to be exasperated with both of them, but she had clearly been more frightened than mad when Uncle Roy waked her up, asking about the bandage.

Howard felt like a knight, having gone out to slay the dragon, or something like that, and then come home to the fair Sylvia, who was tending his wounds. This whole north coast adventure was developing a Knights of the Round Table feel to it, and Howard realized that as stupidly romantic as such notions were, he was happily letting himself be swept up in it all. Sylvia pushed a low ottoman across and propped his leg up on it. “It’s a little swollen,” she said. “Keep it elevated.”

She leaned against his thigh for a moment before pushing herself up off the floor and looked straight into his face. There wasn’t anything flippant in her eyes, just worry, he thought—for him. He was filled suddenly with the urge to put his arms around her, to pull her closer and say something equally serious. In her loosely tied robe and wild hair she seemed to be still warm from her bed, and if ever there was a more perfect, custom-built moment to say what it was he meant to say …

She spoke first, though. “You don’t really believe in this nonsense about Mr. Jimmers’ machine, do you? About it manufacturing ghosts?”

Howard shrugged. “
Something
pretty weird happened in that shed. I don’t know what. I thought
you
were the spiritualist type, though. Now you all of a sudden don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I believe that Mr. Jimmers would go a long way to put one over on Father.”

“Really?” Howard said, surprised. “Would he go
that
far? How about the wild phone call down at the harbor last night? And look who stole the damned thing. It wasn’t us. Do you think he set
up the theft with Mrs. Lamey and her crowd just to confound your father? I don’t follow this whole line of reasoning.”

Sylvia shrugged. “I don’t think he’s got anything to do with Mrs. Lamey anymore. My guess is that Jimmers outright hates her. He doesn’t have anything to do with anyone but himself, and Graham, of course. But now that Graham’s not living in the house, Jimmers is a loose cannon on the deck, and I have the feeling that this machine of his is going to roll all over the place smashing things up. I think he was mad, all right, when he called last night, because he thinks that Father stole the shed out from under his nose, and he can’t stomach the idea. Secretly, though, he might be happy as a clam. Now Father’s got Jimmers’ loony machine and is proud of himself for having it. Father’s guard is down. Do you see what I mean?”