Thirteen Phantasms (14 page)

To humor me, I suppose, she had a go at it. But there was nothing in the keyhole but the tip of the sun, just a tiny arched slice now, disappearing beneath the swell. She stood up, raised her eyebrows, and gestured toward the keyhole as if inviting me to have another look for myself. Nothing but cold green sea lay beyond, tinted with dying fire. We left a note atop his desk, but either he never returned, or he hadn’t the time or desire to visit us at our hotel. I suspect that the former was the case. Our train left for Cherbourg next morning.

We haven’t seen him since. It’s possible, of course, that we will, that his travels will lead him home again to California and that he’ll look us up. He has our address. But as for myself, I rather believe that we won’t, that his course is set and that his travels have lead him in some other direction entirely.

Knock knock.

Bernard Wilkins twisted the scratched restaurant butter-knife in his pudgy hand to catch the eastern sun.

There was a subtle magic in the morning. He felt it most at breakfast—the smells of bacon and coffee, the sound of birds outside, the arrangement of clouds in the deep summer sky, and the day laid out before him like a roadmap unfolded on a dashboard.

This morning he could surely allow himself to forget about the worms and the ether bunnies.

It was Saturday, and he was going to take it easy today, go home and do the crossword puzzle, maybe get the ball game on the radio late in the afternoon while he put in a couple of hours in the garage. The Angels were a half game out and were playing Oakland at two o’clock. In last night’s game Downing had slammed a home run into the outfield scoreboard, knocking out the Scoreboard’s electrical system, and the crowd had gone flat-out crazy, cheering for six solid minutes, stomping and clapping and hooting until the stands were vibrating so badly that they had to stop the game to let everybody calm down.

In his living room Wilkins had been stomping right along with the rest of them, till he was nearly worn out with it.

He grinned now to think about it. Baseball—there was magic in baseball, too … even in your living room you could imagine it, beer and hot dogs, those frozen malts, the smell of cut grass, the summer evenings.

He could remember the smell of baseball leather from his childhood, grass-stained hardballs and new gloves. Chiefly it was the dill pickles and black licorice and Cokes in paper cups that he remembered from back then, when he had played little league ball. They had sold the stuff out of a plywood shack behind the major league diamond.

•

It was just after eight o’clock in the morning, and Norm’s coffee shop was getting crowded with people knocking back coffee and orange juice.

There was nothing like a good meal. Time stopped while you were eating. Troubles abdicated. It was like a holiday. Wilkins sopped up the last of the egg yolk with a scrap of toast, salted it, and put it into his mouth, chewing contentedly. Annie, the waitress, laid his check on the counter, winked at him, and then went off to deal with a wild-eyed woman who wore a half dozen tattered sweaters all at once and was carefully emptying the ketchup bottle onto soda crackers she’d pick out of a basket, afterward dropping them one by one into her ice water, mixing up a sort of poverty-style gazpacho.

Wilkins sighed, wiped his mouth, left a twenty percent tip, heaved himself off the stool and headed for the cash register near the door.

“A good meal,” he said to himself comfortably, as if it were an occult phrase. He paid up, then rolled a toothpick out of the dispenser and poked it between his teeth. He pushed open the glass door with a lordly sweep, and strode outside onto the Sidewalk.

The morning was fine and warm. He walked to the parking lot edge of the pavement, letting the sun wash over him as he hitched up his pants and tucked his thumbs through his belt loops. What he needed was a pair of suspenders. Belts weren’t worth much to a fat man. He rolled the toothpick back and forth in his mouth, working it expertly with his tongue.

•

He was wearing his inventor’s pants. That’s what he had come to call them. He’d had them how many years? Fifteen, anyway. Last winter he had tried to order another pair through a catalogue company back in Wisconsin, but hadn’t had any luck. They were khaki work pants with eight separate pockets and oversized, reinforced belt loops. He wore a heavy key chain on one of the loops, with a retractable ring holding a dozen assorted keys—all the more reason for the suspenders.

The cotton fabric of the trousers was web-thin in places. His wife had patched the knees six different times and had resewn the inseam twice. She wasn’t happy about the idea of him wearing the pants out in public. Someday, Molly was certain of it, he would sit down on the counter stool at Norm’s and the entire rear end would rip right out of them.

Well, that was something Wilkins would face when the time came. He was certain, in his heart, that there would always be a way to patch the pants one more time, which meant infinitely. A stitch in time. Everything was patchable.

“Son of a bitch!” came a shout behind him. He jumped and turned around.

It was the raggedy woman who had been mixing ketchup and crackers into her ice water. She had apparently abandoned her makeshift breakfast.

“What if I am a whore?” she demanded of some long-gone debating partner. “Did he ever give me a dollar?”

Moved somehow by the sunny morning, Wilkins impulsively tugged a dollar bill out of his trousers. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her.

She flounced past him unseeing, and shouted, at no one visibly present, a word that it grieved him to hear. He waved the dollar after her halfheartedly, but she was walking purposefully toward a cluster of disadvantaged-looking people crouched around the dumpster behind the restaurant’s service door.

He wondered for a moment about everything being, in fact, patchable. But perhaps she had some friends among them. Magic after all was like the bottles on the shelves of a dubious-neighborhood liquor store—it was available in different proofs and labels, and at different prices, for anyone who cared to walk in.

And sometimes it helped them. Perhaps obscurely.

He wasn’t keen on revealing any of this business about magic to anyone who wouldn’t understand; but, in his own case, when he was out in the garage working, he never felt quite right wearing anything else except his inventor’s pants.

Somewhere he had read that Fred Astaire had worn a favorite pair of dancing shoes for years after they had worn out, going so far as to pad the interior with newspaper in between re-solings.

Well, Bernard Wilkins had his inventor’s trousers, didn’t he? And by damn he didn’t care what the world thought about them. He scratched at a spot of egg yolk on a pocket and sucked at his teeth, clamping the toothpick against his lip.

Wilkins is the name, he thought with self-indulgent pomposity—invention’s the game.

What he was inventing now was a way to eliminate garden pests. There was a sub-sonic device already on the market to discourage gophers, sure, and another patented machine to chase off mosquitoes.

Neither of them worked worth a damn, really.

The thing that really worked on gophers was a wooden propeller nailed to a stick that was driven into the ground. The propeller whirled in the wind, sending vibrations down the stick into the dirt. He had built three of them, big ones, and as a result he had no gopher trouble.

The tomato worms were working him over hard, though, scouring the tomato vines clean of leaves and tomatoes in the night. He sometimes found the creatures in the morning, heavy and long, glowing bright green with pirated chlorophyll and wearing a face that was far too mammalian, almost human.

The sight of one of them bursting under a tramping shoe was too horrible for any sane person to want to do it twice.

Usually what he did was gingerly pick them off the stems and throw them over the fence into his neighbor’s yard, but they crawled back through again in the night, further decimating the leaves of his plants. He had replanted three times this season.

What he was working on was a scientific means to get rid of the things. He thought about the nets in his garage, and the boxes of crystal-growing kits he had bought.

Behind him, a car motor revved. A dusty old Ford Torino shot toward him from the back of the parking lot, burning rubber from the rear tires in a cloud of white smoke, the windshield an opaque glare of reflected sunlight. In sudden panic Wilkins scuffed his shoes on the asphalt, trying to reverse his direction, to hop back out of the way before he was run down. ‘ The front tire nearly ran over his foot as he yelled and pounded on the hood, and right then the hooked post from the broken-off passenger-side mirror caught him by the key chain and yanked his legs out from under him.

He fell heavily to the pavement and slid.

For one instant it was a contest between his inventor’s pants and the car—then the waistband gave way and the inseam ripped out, and he was watching his popped-off shoes bounce away across the parking lot and his pants disappear as the car made a fast right onto Main.

License number! He scrabbled to his feet, lunging substantially naked toward the parking lot exit. There the car went, zigging away through traffic, cutting off a pickup truck at the corner. He caught just the first letter of the license, a G, or maybe a Q. From the mirror support, flapping and dancing and billowing out at the end of the snagged key chain, his inventor’s pants flailed themselves to ribbons against the street, looking for all the world as if the pantlegs were running furiously, trying to keep up with the car. In a moment the car was gone, and his pants with it.

The sight of the departing pants sent him jogging for his own car. Appallingly, the summer breeze was ruffling the hair on his bare legs, and he looked back at the restaurant in horror, wondering if he had been seen. Sure enough, a line of faces stared at him from inside Norm’s, a crowd of people leaning over the tables along the parking lot window. Nearly every recognizable human emotion seemed to play across the faces: surprise, worry, hilarity, joy, disgust, fear—everything but envy. He could hear the whoop of someone’s laughter, muffled by the window glass.

One of his penny-loafers lay in the weeds of a flowerbed, and he paused long enough to grab it, then hurried on again in his stocking feet and baggy undershorts, realizing that the seat of his shorts had mostly been abraded away against the asphalt when he had gone down.

Son of a bitch
, he thought, unconsciously echoing the raggedy woman’s evaluation.

His car was locked, and instinctively he reached for his key chain, which of course was to hell and gone down Seventeenth Street by now. “Shit!” he said, hearing someone stepping up behind him. He angled around toward the front of the car, so as to be at least half-hidden from the crowd in Norm’s.

Most of the faces were laughing now. People were pointing. He was all right. He hadn’t been hurt after all. They could laugh like zoo apes and their consciences would be clear. Look at him run! A fat man in joke shorts! Look at that butt!

It was an old man who had come up behind him. He stood there now in the parking lot, shaking his head seriously.

“It was hit and run,” the old man said. “I saw the whole thing. I was right there in the window, and I’m prepared to go to court. Bastard didn’t even look.”

He stood on the other side of the car, between Wilkins and the window full of staring people. Someone hooted from a car driving past on Sixteenth, and Wilkins flinched, dropping down to his hands and knees and groping for the hide-a-key under the front bumper. He pawed the dirty underside of the bumper frantically, but couldn’t find the little magnetic box. Maybe it was on the rear bumper. He damned well wasn’t going to go crawling around after it, providing an easy laugh …

A wolf-whistle rang out from somewhere above, from an open window across Sixteenth. He stood up hurriedly.

“Did you get the license?” the old man said.

“What? No, I didn’t.” Wilkins took a deep breath to calm himself.

The goddam magnetic hide-a-key. It had probably dropped off down the highway somewhere. Wouldn’t you know it! Betrayed by the very thing …

His heart still raced, but it didn’t pound so hard. He concentrated on simmering down, clutching his chest with his hand. “Easy, boy,” he muttered to himself, his eyes nearly shut. That was better. He could take stock now.

It was a miracle he wasn’t hurt. If he was a skinny man the physical forces of the encounter would probably have torn him in half. As it was, his knee was scraped pretty good, but nothing worse than ten million such scrapes he had suffered as a kid. His palms were raw, and the skin on his rear end stung pretty well. He felt stiff, too.

He flexed his leg muscles and rotated his arms. The wolf-whistle sounded again, but he ignored it.

Miraculously, he had come through nearly unharmed. No broken bones. Nothing a bottle of Ben Gay wouldn’t fix, maybe some Bactine on the scrapes.

He realized then that he still had the toothpick in his mouth. Unsteadily, he poked at his teeth with it, hoping that it would help restore the world to normalcy. It was soft and splintered, though, and no good for anything, so he threw it away into the juniper plants.