In For a Penny (12 page)

He stooped to pick up the three stones, and like wind through a suddenly opened door, there came unbidden into his mind a recollection of his own vanished childhood, and he found himself within the home he had grown up in. He heard the drumming of rain on the porch roof and saw the passing clouds through his bedroom windows, the soft lamplight in the living room, the fire in the hearth, his own reflection in the mantelpiece mirror. As a young man, years later and after months of travel, he had come home unannounced one rainy October evening, and he had lingered in the wet street, possessed by the inexpressible sadness of lost and irretrievable things, silently watching that same homely lamplight shining as ever through the windows, beyond which his parents and his younger brother sat together in the living room: again the flickering firelight, the smoke from his father’s pipe rising above his chair like a ghostly wraith, his mother reading. …

He found himself openly and unashamedly weeping now, just as he had wept those many years past, before ascending the porch and opening the door to the happy surprise of his family, and he found that he had put his hand out as if to grasp a phantom doorknob.

. . .

Blake saw a woman walking way off in the distance, although he had the curious and passing notion that she was not in fact distant at all, but that instead he was seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope, as if the weight of the declining afternoon were compressing the remaining daylight into a lens. She flitted abruptly closer, then blinked away entirely before reappearing closer yet again, stooping to pick something up, perhaps a stone.

Her voice drifted down the canyon toward him like siren song, sounding to him like the voice of his wife, Molly. He found that he could picture her quite clearly: the way she had of pulling her wayward hair back from her face, her dark eyes, her figure the first time he had seen her stepping out of the bath. Beyond where she stood he could see the roofline of their house, the stone chimney and the big low-limbed sycamore that shaded the yard. It seemed to shimmer in a heat haze despite the cool afternoon, and the drifts of leaves stirred roundabout him so that they shifted and sighed. On the instant Molly vanished, if indeed it were she, leaving the arroyo empty.

Behind him, farther up the rutted dirt road that followed the creek deeper into the canyon, the peak of a mountain loomed craggy and tree-shadowed against the sky with such startling clarity that it might have been painted on a curtain, and he was struck with the notion that some unseen force might at any moment pull the curtain aside to reveal a sky infinitely more vast than the flat blue ceiling above him. As he walked he listened to the lonesome afternoon stillness, to his own quiet footsteps, and there arose around him again a myriad of voices in a babble of half-discerned conversation like watery echoes leaking out of an uncorked bottle.

He saw a moving dust cloud drifting over the arroyo, miles away toward the west, and as soon as he saw it he heard the muted, low-gear rumble and pop of an automobile with a hole in the muffler – the familiar sound of their old blue Plymouth. When he and Molly had crossed Canada back in ‘65, the muffler had rusted through outside Winnipeg, and the Plymouth had made a popping noise that they’d put up with until they’d driven into Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where they’d spent three Indian Summer days at the old Cranberry Inn Guest House. The memory of it was as fresh in his mind as if the years had been swept away, and he recalled the name of the waitress at the Copper Kettle steak house and the bottled Leinenkugel beer and the dark red of the fall maples that had been so at odds with the warm weather. He listened to the muttering of the distant engine and watched the dust cloud to see if it was approaching, but in his mind he was driving down along Lake Superior again, into Wisconsin, with his arm across the top of the seat and his hand on the glass steering wheel knob that encased a shamrock. Molly sat beside him, pointing out a big stilt-legged heron in a roadside pond.

She was Irish, a nurse. They had met after the war, when he was overseas, and she had come back with him to the states where they were married in California. When they’d sold the Plymouth he had kept the steering wheel knob as a memento, but when Molly had died, he had given it away along with a box of souvenirs and keepsakes to their eight year old grandson, who understood the seashells and quartz crystals and keepsakes in the box to be a great treasure, which it had been, in its time.

The dust cloud was diminishing now, the sound of the engine dwindling. Because of his singular perspective, and the peculiar distortions of distance, it was impossible at last to say in which direction the car had been traveling, if indeed it were a car at all, and in fact the dirt road along the creek bed was partly washed out by winter rains, and sections of it were green with wild mustard and castor bean plants. Soon, it seemed to him, time and weather might easily obliterate all signs that a road had ever existed.

He walked downhill a ways before once again ascending, the ground rising slowly out of the arroyo and into a narrow canyon, in among the shadows of black alders that grew along the creek. On the first faint breath of evening wind, the words,
home before dark,
muttered through his head as if someone – it sounded like Molly, exactly like her – had spoken to him through a cardboard tube. He turned to look at the sun where it hovered over the hills. In a half hour night would descend over the canyon, and it seemed to him that the waning daylight contained a lifetime of memories, that as long as the sun shone and the world was alive around him he might hold onto them. Nightfall promised an end to things, but the idea of letting go dismayed him. If he had the old Plymouth, by God, he might throw a few things into the trunk, fire it up, and drive out of there, back into the midst of things, before the road was utterly impassable.

Just then he heard the clatter of another stone hitting a tree trunk some few feet to his right, followed by the sound of it falling into dead leaves. He bent down to pick it up: the same sort of circular black stone, with its rune-scrawl veins of quartzite like a cryptic x-ray message. He put it into his pocket, then walked farther along the creekside trail, his mind wandering, haphazardly sorting images and memories. Another stone clattered against a shoulder-high boulder next to him, and he stepped behind it as another small scattering of stones fell out of the clear sky, tearing down through the limbs of the alders in a rain of leaves and twigs.

He picked several of them up, wondering at the suggestive patterns of their imbedded designs, hearing voices in the creek water babbling over mossy stones and in the wind rustling the leaves – his own voice, quite distinctly now, explaining to his sons about winding a piece of string around a wooden top, and then Molly’s voice, clear as anything: “Can I join you?” she asked, and there was the clatter and hum of the top spinning on concrete, and himself saying, “Do we look like we’re coming apart?” and then laughter, his sons’ laughter and Molly’s laughter and his own. He could recall the very afternoon, the way their old terrier had gone sniffing after the spinning top, the sound of which was as loud in his ears as the hum of bees in a hive.

He saw something stirring back in among the twilight shadows of the woods, and he paused, hidden by the broad trunk of a sycamore, peering into the gloom. He glimpsed it again – a furtive shifting against the canyon wall where a little brush-choked defile rose into a leafy and impenetrable darkness. For a brief moment a human figure separated from the background shadows and stood frozen against a pale granite wall like a silhouette cut-out: Molly; he was sure of it now. She stood watching him, and he thought he saw her nod, as if they shared some secret knowledge, but then her shadow merged once again with the darkness of the underbrush, and he was left alone, listening to the freshening wind in the treetops and the faraway drone of an airplane invisible in the sky overhead, a lonesome sound that stirred in him a nostalgic regret for remembered places.

He crossed the creek, stepping from rock to rock. On the other side lay a clearing, which he crossed anxiously, listening now to what sounded like the scratching of a nail on weathered concrete. The heavy limbs of an oak hung nearly to the ground ahead, shading the mouth of the defile into which Molly had vanished and making a leafy bower littered with acorns and dead leaves. He ducked within, where he saw that something lay nearly hidden behind the vast trunk of the oak tree, a wooden box the size of a packing crate. He walked toward it warily, the scratching noise rising and falling, revolving in his head.

It was an old gramophone that lay in the leaves and sparse weeds behind the tree trunk, its ornately etched metal cone facing skyward like an immense black lily, the familiar circular stones scattered on the ground beneath the cone as if they had dribbled out of its open mouth. A heavy disk of waxy black glass revolved on the turntable, the bent gramophone arm pressing the needle against it, making the incessant scratching noise until after another moment it ground itself still. He bent over and lifted the needle from the disk, cranked the handle a half dozen times, then lowered the needle into the first deep groove.

At once the woods were filled with music, calling up memories of the early years of their marriage, when he and Molly had danced on weekends at the old Moonlight Ballroom in Long Beach, how they had put records on their phonograph at home and practiced dance steps in the living room, laughing, breaking off to start the music over and over again and to hell with the casserole growing cold in the turned-off oven.

He stood in the deep shadows, reliving those days, past times revolving in his head like the stars going round in the sky, passing away relentlessly below the horizon of his mind as the breezy music swirled around him. He had read once that if in God’s mercy you awakened to find yourself in heaven, you would realize with a happy shock of recognition that you had been living in a tiny corner of that bright country all your life. But if that were true, how much harder it would be to give up earthbound treasures, to let go of the people, the places, and the things you’d grown to love during your brief span of years. …

The song played itself out, and he bent down and lifted the needle, pushing the arm aside, and then ducked out from under the tree, walking back across the clearing, easily finding the creek crossing and the narrow path that led back up to the road. The sun had gone down behind the hills, and he had a growing apprehension of being abroad in the darkness, although he knew that what he feared was not so much the coming of night as it was the loss of the day.

Ascending the hill, he saw that the sun had disappeared and that a mist was rising from the sandy arroyo, an obscuring fog drawn from subterranean wells, up through the rock and sand, through the dense tangle of roots and dead leaves, ghosting uphill in the evening gloom on a languid and fitful breeze. He hurried down into the gray murk, which swirled up around his feet like a cloud of uncertainty, hiding the rocks and vegetation along the road. Within the fog there arose a grinding noise, like a mill wheel turning or the grinding of the gramophone needle, and deep within it, like a far-off echo, he could hear what sounded like the repeated opening and closing of a heavy wooden door.

He heard his name spoken, Molly’s voice reaching him from a great distance, and he felt his way along hurriedly, his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker, peering into the curtain of fog that swirled up from the lower elevations. Through a sudden window in the mist he saw their house against the cliff, murkily out of focus. He headed toward the garage, the door of which stood open, and although it was nearly dark within, he could see the shadow of his old Plymouth. It seemed to him that the fog wasn’t rising out of the arroyo at all, but was leaking in great billowy clouds out of the car’s tailpipes, and he could hear the creak and mutter of the engine cooling down, as if the car had just been driven some distance.

He was swept with another moment of dizzy confusion, as if the murk settling in around him were swirling through his head. Of course he and Molly had sold the car, hadn’t they? – a long time ago, to be sure. They had bought a Buick and then a couple of other cars after that. But the Plymouth dated from that part of their lives when they had been – what? He would have said when they had been happiest, but that wasn’t true. They had always been happy in their marriage, even when things had been troubled. Happiness wasn’t a day-to-day thing so much as something that you saw most clearly looking back, having found the right perspective. It was simply that they had put the most road miles on the Plymouth – two trips to the east with their sons, day trips to Palomar and Ramona and Joshua Tree, weekend runs to his sister’s place up at Lone Pine. Now here it sat, like a gift horse, and he was happy to see it.

He hurried into the dim interior of the garage, which was a lumber of disorienting shadows in the fading twilight, and switched on the overhead bulb, a single incandescent trouble light that hung from the rafters. For an instant it seemed to him that Molly herself sat in the front seat, as if once again they were setting out for parts unknown, and he could hear her voice again, just as clear as rainwater. He ran his hand across the front fender, the cool steel solid under his palm. The paint was like new after all these years, a robin’s egg blue as deep as the sky. He saw that the key was in the ignition.

“Nearly ready to go,” he said out loud, and for one rash moment he considered simply backing out of there and driving away down the arroyo.

But he had things to settle yet, indefinable things, and he was swept with the notion that it was a long time since he had been home, a long time that he had been wandering in the canyon. He went out into the air again, feeling the cold and damp of nightfall. The house lights were already on, and smoke was tumbling up out of the stone chimney. The illuminated house was an island in the murk, which had closed in around him, settling over his world with a ghostly pallor, the silence broken only by water dripping from the eaves and by the sound of activity in the kitchen, the muffled clank of pots and pans and the whir of an electric can opener.