Thirteen Phantasms (15 page)

“You should have got his license. That’s the first thing. But I should talk. I didn’t get it either.” The old man looked back toward the window, insulted on Wilkins’s behalf, scowling at the crowd, which had dwindled now. “Damned bunch of assholes …” A few people still stood and gaped, waiting to get another look at Wilkins, hoping for a few more details to flesh out the story they would be telling everyone they met for the next six weeks. Six months, more likely. It was probably the only story they had, the morons. They’d make it last forever. “Got your car keys, didn’t they?”

Wilkins nodded. Suddenly he was shaking. His hands danced against the hood of his car and he sat back heavily on the high concrete curb of a planter.

“Here now,” the old man said, visibly worried. “Wait. I got a blanket in the car. What the hell am I thinking?” He hurried away to an old, beaten Chevrolet wagon, opening the cargo door and hauling out a stadium blanket in a clear plastic case. He pulled the blanket out and draped it over Wilkins’s shoulders.

Wilkins sat on the curb with his head sagging forward now. For a moment there he had felt faint. His heart had started to even out, though. He wanted to lie down, but he couldn’t, not there on the parking lot.

“Shock,” the old man said to him. “Accompanies every injury, no matter what. You live around here?”

Wilkins nodded. “Down on French Street. Few blocks.”

“I’ll give you a ride. Your car won’t go nowhere. Might as well leave it here. You can get another key and come back down after it. They get your wallet, too?”

His wallet gone! Of course they had got his wallet. He hadn’t thought of that. He wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Well that was just fine. What was in there? At least thirty-odd dollars and his bank card and gas card and Visa—the whole magilla was gone.

The old man shook his head. “These punks,” he said. “This is Babylon we’re living in, stuff like this happens to a man.”

Wilkins nodded and let the old man lead him to the Chevy wagon.

Wilkins climbed into the passenger seat, and the man got in and fired up the engine. He backed out terrifically slowly, straight past the window where a couple of people still gaped out at them. One of the people pointed and grinned stupidly, and the old man, winding down the window, leaned out and flipped the person off vigorously with both hands.

“Scum-sucking pig!” he shouted, then headed out down the alley toward Sixteenth, shaking his head darkly, one wheel bouncing down off the curb as he swerved out onto the street, angling up Sixteenth toward French.

“Name’s Bob Dodge,” the man said, reaching across to shake hands.

Wilkins felt very nearly like crying. This man redeems us all, he said to himself as he blinked at the Good Samaritan behind the wheel. “Bernard Wilkins,” he said, shaking the man’s hand. “I guess I’m lucky. No harm done. Could have been worse.” He was feeling better. Just to be out of there helped. He had stopped shaking.

“Damn right you’re lucky. If I was you I’d take it easy, though. Sometimes you throw something out of kilter, you don’t even know it till later. Whiplash works that way.”

Something out of kilter. Wilkins rejected the thought. “I feel … intact enough. Little bit sand-papered, that’s all. If he’d hit me …” He sighed deeply; he didn’t seem to be able to get enough air. “Take a right here. That’s it—the blue house there with the shingles.” The car pulled into the driveway, and Wilkins turned to the old man and put out his hand again. “Thanks,” he said. “You want to step in for a moment, and I’ll give you the blanket back. I could probably rustle up a cup of Java.”

“Naw. I guess I’ll be on my way. I left a pal of mine back in the booth. Don’t want to stiff him on the check. I’ll see you down to Norm’s one of these days. Just leave the blanket in the back of your car.”

“I will.”

Wilkins opened the car door, got out, and stood on the driveway, realizing for the first time that the blanket he was wearing had the California Angels logo on it, the big A with a halo. He watched Bob Dodge drive off. An Angels fan! He might have known it. Had he been there when Downing wrecked the big scoreboard? Wilkins hoped so.

Some destructions didn’t matter, like the scoreboard, and those clear plastic backboards that the basketball players were routinely exploding a few years ago, with their energetic slamdunks. There were repairmen for those things, and the repairmen probably made more money in a week than Wilkins pulled down from Social Security in a year. He thought of his pants, beating against the street at forty miles an hour. Where were they now? Reduced to atoms? Lying in a ditch?

Hell.

He went in through the front door, and there was Molly, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Her pleasant look turned at once to uncomprehending alarm.

“What—?” she started to say.

“Lost the pants up at Norm’s,” he said as breezily as he could. He grinned at her. This was what she had prophesied. It had come to pass. “A guy drove me home. No big deal!” He hurried past her, grinning and nodding, holding tight to the blanket so that she wouldn’t see where his knee was scraped. He didn’t want any fuss. “I’ll tell you in a bit!” he called back, overriding her anxious questions. “Later! I’ve got to … damn it—” He was sweating, and his heart was thudding furiously again in his chest. “Leave me alone! Just leave me alone for a while, will you?”

There had to be something that could be salvaged. In his second-best pair of fancy-dinners pants he plodded past the washer and drier and down the back steps.

His backyard was deep, nearly a hundred feet from the back patio to the fence, the old boards of which were almost hidden under the branches and tendrils and green leaves of the tomato plants. Sometimes he worried about having planted them that far out. Closer to the house would have been safer. But the topsoil way out there was deep and good. Avocado leaves fell year round, rotting down into a dark, twiggy mulch. When he had spaded the ground up for the first time, he had found six inches of leafy humus on the surface, and the tomatoes that grew from that rich soil could be very nearly as big as grapefruit.

Still, it was awfully far out, way past the three big windmilling gopher repellers. He couldn’t keep an eye on things out there. As vigilant as he was, the worms seemed to take out the tomatoes, one by one. He had put out a pony-pack of Early Girls first, back in February. It had still been too cold, and the plants hadn’t taken off. A worm got five of the six one night during the first week in March, and he had gone back to the nursery in order to get more Early Girls. He had ended up buying six small Beefsteak plants too, from a flat, and another six Better Boys in four-inch pots, thinking that out of eighteen plants, plus the one the worms had missed, he ought to come up with something.

What he had now, in mid June, were nine good plants. Most of the Early Girls had come to nothing, the worms having savaged them pretty badly. And the Beefsteaks were putting out fruit that was deformed, bulbous, and off-tasting.

The Better Boys were coming along, though. He knelt in the dirt, patiently untangling and staking up vines, pinching off new leaves near the flower clusters, cultivating the soil around the base of the plants and mounding it up into little dikes to hold water around the roots. Soon he would need another bundle of six-foot stakes.

There was a dark, round shadow way back in there among the Better Boys, nearly against the fence pickets; he could make out the yellow-orange flush against the white paint. For a moment he stared at it, adjusting his eyes to the tangled shadows. It must be a cluster of tomatoes.

He reached his arm through the vines, feeling around, shoving his face in among them and breathing in the bitter scent of the leaves. He found the fence picket and groped around blindly until he felt them—

No. It.

There was only one tomato, one of the Better Boys, deep in the vines. It was enormous, and it was only half ripe. Slowly he spread his hand out, tracing with his thumb and pinky finger along the equator of the tomato.

“Leaping Jesus,” he said out loud.

The damned thing must have an eight-inch diameter, ten-inch, maybe. He shoved his head farther in, squinting into the tangled depths. He could see it better now. It hung there heavily, from a stem as big around as his thumb.

Knock, knock
, he thought.

Who’s there?

Ether.

Ether who? Ether bunnies.

No ball game today, he thought. No crossword puzzle.

He backed out of the vines and strode purposefully toward the garage. He hadn’t planned on using the ether nets this year, but this was a thing that needed saving. He could imagine the worms eyeing the vast Better Boy from their—what, nests? Lairs?—and making plans for the evening. Tying metaphorical napkins around their necks and hauling out the silverware.

He pulled open the warped garage door and looked at the big freezer in the corner and at the draped, fine-mesh nets on the wall. The crystal might or might not be mature, but he would have to use them tonight.

He had read the works of Professor Dayton C. Miller, who had been a colleague of Edward Williams Morley, and, like Miller, Wilkins had become convinced that Einstein had been wrong—light was
not
in any sense particles, but consisted of waves traveling through a medium that the nineteenth-century physicists had called ether, the luminiferous ether.

“Luminiferous ether.” He rolled the phrase across his tongue, listening to the magic in it.

Ordinary matter like planets and people and baseballs traveled through the ether without being affected by it. The ether passed through them like water through a swimming-pool net. But anything that bent light, anything like a magnifying glass, or a prism, or even a Coke bottle, participated with the ether a little, and so experienced a certain drag.

Molly had a collection of glass and crystal animals—people had offered her serious money for them, over the years—and Wilkins had noticed that in certain seasons some of them moved off of their dust-free spots on the shelf. The ones that seemed to have moved farthest were a set of comical rabbits that they had picked up in Atlantic City in—it must have been—1954. He had come to the conclusion that the effect occurred because of the angle and lengths of the rabbits’ ears.

A correctly shaped crystal, he reasoned, would simply be stopped by the eternally motionless ether, and would be yanked off of the moving Earth like … like his pants had been ripped off of his body when the car-mirror post had hooked them.

And so he had bought a lot of crystal-growing kits at a local hobby store, and had “seeded” the Tupperware growing environments with spatially customized, rabbit-shaped forms that he’d fashioned from copper wire. It had taken him months to get the ears right.

The resulting crystalline silicon-dioxide shapes would not exhibit their ether-anchored properties while they were still in the refractive water—frozen water, at the moment—and he had not planned to put them to the test until next year.

But tonight he would need an anchor. There was the Better Boy to be saved. The year, with all of its defeats and humiliations, would not have been for nothing. He grinned to think about the Better Boy, hanging out there in the shadows, impossibly big and round. A slice of that on a hamburger …

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Samoa.

Samoa who?

Samoa ether bunnies.

He whistled a little tune, admiring the sunlight slanting in through the dusty window. The Early Girls and the misshapen Beefsteaks would have to be sacrificed. He would drape the nets under them. Let the worms feast on them in outer space if they had the spittle for it, as Thomas More had said.

•

Molly’s Spanish aunt had once sent them a lacy, hand-embroidered bedspread. Apparently a whole convent-full of nuns had spent the bulk of their lifetimes putting the thing together. Frank
Sinatra
couldn’t have afforded to buy the thing at the sort of retail price it deserved. Wilkins had taken great pains in laying the gorgeous cloth over their modest bed, and had luxuriated in lying under it while reading something appropriate—Shakespeare’s sonnets, as he recalled.

That same night their cat had jumped onto the bed and almost instantly had vomited out a live tapeworm that must have been a yard long. The worm had convulsed on the bedspread, several times standing right up on its head, and in horror Wilkins had balled the bedspread up around the creature, thrown it onto the floor and stomped on it repeatedly, and then flung the bundle out into the yard. Eventually Wilkins and his wife had gone to sleep. That night it had rained for eight hours straight, and by morning the bedspread was something he’d been ashamed even to have visible in his trash.

•

When the obscuring ice melted, the rabbit-shaped crystals would be the floats, the equivalent of the glass balls that Polynesian fishermen apparently used to hold up the perimeters of their nets. The crystals would grab the fabric of the celestial ether like good tires grabbing pavement, and the lacy nets—full of tomato worms, their teeth in the flesh of the luckless Early Girls and Beefsteaks—would go flying off into space.

Let them come crawling back then, Wilkins thought gravely. He searched his mind for doubt but found none. There was nothing at all wrong with his science. It only wanted application. Tonight, he would give it that.