In For a Penny (17 page)

Gasping out loud, he slammed the lid shut, stood up, and trod backward, dizzy and stumbling, his heart pounding like a nail press. He had caught only a glimpse of it. Surely he was mistaken! He must have seen a piece of paper with a
picture
of jewels on it. He knelt before it again, grasped the ring, and raised the lid an inch, peering inside. What he saw wasn’t paper.

He pulled the lid entirely open and took a good look now. Costume jewelry? Surely these
couldn’t
be diamonds and rubies and emeralds. But by God they
looked
real enough! They didn’t have the cheap and gaudy look of costume jewelry. The pendant lying in front had a diamond in it as big as a half dollar, surrounded by green stones that looked prodigiously deep, like transparent, mossy wells. What had he heard about diamonds? He remembered now: they didn’t fog up when you blew on them. Glass fogged up. That was one of the simple tests.

He drew the diamond pendant out of the box and blew gently from deep in his throat. No fog. Still…He shoved it back in, shut the lid of the box, stepped back, and blew on the face of his watch, which fogged instantly, the moisture evaporating slowly in the cool air. Without a backward glance he picked up the box, walked to the car like a man carrying a live bomb, shoved it into the back seat, and without a second thought headed straight for the secrecy of his garage, his head aswirl with kaleidoscopic visions of jewelry.

. . .

Safe at last, with the door shut behind him, he set the box on the bench and then switched on the trouble light clamped to the peg board on the wall, once again foregoing the overhead light, which would be too bright, too revealing. Licking his lips, he opened the bread box, flabbergasted at what he saw despite his expectations. He’d had only a quick glimpse of it in the parking lot, but now he saw the extent of the treasure, and the immensity of what he saw confounded him. He disentangled the diamond pendant from a gold tiara set with rubies, the tiara incredibly heavy in his hand: easily a pound of gold and gems. There were bracelets that looked like they’d been cast in Atlantis or some other fabled place, and loose cut stones the size of birds’ eggs. This wasn’t fashionable jewelry; it was the kind of thing you found buried on a desert island—pirate jewelry, King Solomon’s mine, Aladdin’s cave.

He hefted a necklace of giant sapphires, all of them cunningly faceted, each as blue as a tropical ocean. Beneath it lay a flat, diamond-encrusted broach, thick with intricately woven filigree gold, the diamonds spiraling like a starry nebula disappearing into its own infinite center. The floor of the box was layered with gold coins, heaped with them, old and foreign looking, immense and fabulous. There were ropes of gold chain with arcane links, links that seemed to him to be multiplying through a strange alchemical parthenogenesis even as he watched, and which cascaded out onto the bench top like an autumn harvest out of the mouth of a cornucopia. His hands trembling, he hung chain after chain around his neck, encircling himself with gold, and still there were more chains within the box, shoved back into the dim corners, glittering and winking, coiling and moving like golden serpents. He clasped the sapphire necklace around his neck and then hung the diamond over all, the gold and jewels making such a combined heap that the diamond pressed against his chin. He slipped jeweled bracelets over his wrists and wound chain around his forearms until he was literally bowed beneath its golden weight, and then he cinched up his pants and shoveled coins into his pockets, filling them front and back, stooping over to slide coins into his shoes, caught up in the overwhelming certainty that there was no end to the treasure heaped within the bread box and spilling out of it. If he chose he could bathe in it, swim in it, bury himself beneath it.

The garage itself was gold with reflected light, light that tinted his flesh so that he himself might have been cast of the metal. Sounds of unspeakable glee escaped his throat, and he heard answering sounds from behind him, from the direction of the window, and he turned with an expectant avidity, anxious to gaze upon the reflected splendor, to see what he had become simply because he had believed in himself, played his own hunches, trusted the fates, cast caution to the winds, put first things first.

Within the dim glass floated the familiar orb-like face—his own face, hanging like a single pale pearl on an invisible thread, staring back at him, the anxious whispering starting up again like a voice on the wind, punctuated with tinny laughter that sounded like an echo of his own glee bouncing around in a coffee can. He was filled with the overwhelming sense that the whispering voice offered some final bit of secret knowledge, a chance to apprehend something that, if he hesitated, would be forever denied to him. Encumbered by the weight of the treasure, he slogged heavily toward the window, his heart laboring in his chest. For a moment he saw his own distorted face quite clearly in the glass, his neck encircled with gold and jewels, as if his severed head stood atop a small mountain of treasure. But as he stared into his own hollow eyes, they slowly transposed themselves into a single staring patch of darkness that took on the semblance of a cave, and he saw that the darkness within was mysteriously deep, and that there were even deeper shadows within the darkness, and shadows within the shadows.

He felt himself unmoored from the earth, from the concrete floor of the garage, and he drifted weightlessly forward down that tunnel, drawn on a draught of cool air and following the shadow of the face that receded before him now, appearing and disappearing in the gloom, whispering secrets through a mouth that was a dark and vaguely moving smudge. Around him lay a vast empty space, and on the dead air there sounded the low whispering, sometimes like a voice, sometimes like the suggestion of a wind blowing across the cave mouth far behind him. A pinpoint of radiance glimmered overhead like the pole star, a radiance that held within it an immensely rich promise, a decoction of all the gratification and wonder and riches of creation. Its pale light grew steadily brighter until it illuminated a cathedrallike cavern, the shadows separating out as in a dawn landscape, shapes growing distinct.

He found himself looking down on a vast subterranean treasure room, a vault apparently limitless in extent. Within it lay open chests of jewels: ropes of pearls, cut stones spilling over the sides, the chests themselves half sunk in gold coins that stretched away in dunes, all of it sparkling in the opalescent radiance of reflected light that jumped and leaped and died away and flared up again like witch fire to reveal further treasures on ever more distant shores of heaped coin. And as he looked down upon the immensity of that place he knew quite clearly what the whispering voice had promised him, what it was he was being offered. And the odd certainty came to him that in a single gulp he might swallow it all, that he might drink it all in, and so gain the world itself just as he had consumed the pearl in wine.

He was abruptly aware of a knocking sound, and the awareness brought him part way back to his senses. It was the rattling knock of knuckles on glass, insistent and distracting. The cavern with its treasures winked away, and the familiar whispering face hung before him again, blind and idiotic and already evaporating, growing transparent, replaced by another face that for one long moment Mason failed to recognize. And then, with a shock of surprise, he realized that he was looking into a woman’s face and that his own drooling mouth was hanging open stupidly. With an effort he focused his eyes and saw that it was Peggy, standing outside the window, looking back in at him, her face a mask of disbelief. He tried to smile at her, but couldn’t, and the effort was merely disfiguring. She disappeared, and the garage door opened, the overhead light blinking on in a revealing wash of illumination that was very nearly painful to Mason’s eyes, which had grown used to the darkness.

She didn’t look angry, but instead was once again worried and obviously mystified, as if what she saw were beyond her capacity to understand. Mason was instantly infected with the same confusion, and the total clarity that he had felt only moments before, the sharp focus of desire and anticipation and knowledge, evaporated like steam. He looked around himself at the brightly lit garage, its entire demeanor altered now that the shadows were gone, and there came into his mind the realization that he hadn’t gone back down for the Chinese food as he had intended, that he had simply forgotten it in his greed and excitement, and he wondered what time it was, how long Peggy had waited for him to return.

His clothes, he realized, were a cornucopia of stinking filth from his wallowing in the trash bin, and around his neck, to his surprise and horror, hung a collection of yanked-open coat hangers and frayed bits of greasy twine and loops of rusty chain from a swag lamp. Rubber bands and string and ribbon encircled his wrists, and his shoes were stuffed with broken plastic spoons and forks discolored with old food. The gold and jewels that he had decorated himself with were gone, metamorphosed into trash.

“I thought …” he started to say to Peggy, but what he had thought was too ludicrous to express. He wore the evidence of it.
The bread box
, he thought, turning to the bench, still faintly hopeful. But the breadbox was empty of its riches and contained only a few bits of leftover mouldering trash, the sight of which nauseated him. He sat down in a heap on the cold concrete floor, the rafters and the workbench and window spinning around him, and began to tug at the coat hangers and string, trying to cast off the trash that he had used to ornament himself. He couldn’t look at Peggy, although his mind was consumed with the fear that he would hear the door shut behind him, that she would simply walk away and leave him there.

He realized then that she was bent over him, and that his own efforts to disentangle himself were simply getting in her way. She pulled a scissors down from the peg board and cut the string and twine as he pulled off his shoes, dumping the debris out onto the floor. He struggled to his feet finally and opened the bench drawer, silently pulling out the Coke bottle, which was half full of cigarette butts. The fishbowl contained a few wet stones lying on a bed of dirt. He set both of them into the open bread box and started to shut the lid, noticing then that the overhead light glinted on a single penny lying in the back corner of the box.

For a time he stood staring at it. “A penny,” he said to Peggy.

“I see it,” she said. “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

“Yeah,” he said. He reached into his pocket and brought out Mrs. Fortunato’s coin purse, snapped it open, picked up the penny, and dropped it inside. Then he closed the bread box and shoved it into the garage trash can, putting the lid on after it.

Together they went out into the night, walking the two blocks to Mrs. Fortunato’s house, which was dark and closed up. He laid the purse and its penny on the welcome mat, and the two of them walked home again.

t
he windows in the tiny wooden house faced east and west so as to get the most out of the sunlight, which was filtered by avocado leaves the year around. And it was in the west window that Johnson now placed an empty fishbowl: sparkling clean, its gravel rinsed, its glass walls wiped clean of algae—not a bowl at all, strictly speaking, but a three gallon lidless cube salvaged from a chemistry laboratory. In the height of the summer, which was by now two months gone, the sun crossed the sky almost overhead, and the house was illuminated by leafy sunlight through a bank of windows under the shallow eaves, but in the autumn the sun fell away again in the direction of the ocean, and the interior grew dim, so that Johnson needed a lamp to read by even at midday.

With the turning of the seasons he shifted the fish bowl around the small room, because he took a keen enjoyment in the rays of sunlight that rippled in the clear water and shone through the translucent green leaves of the waterweeds. It occurred to him now that a competent engineer might have designed the house to spin on a sort of lazy-susan platform, like a rotating stage in a theater, so that it could be moved on its axis to take advantage of natural light.

But he was no engineer; he was at best a carpenter, or had been before he retired. He had built the house in the avocado tree forty years ago out of redwood fence lumber, setting it not on the tree branches themselves, but within them, resting it on posts fixed in concrete pilings. In the years since, the tree limbs had bent and bowed and draped around and over the rough-cut wooden walls and roof as if to embrace them. As time passed and the foliage thickened, the natural light had dwindled, which was to be expected, since that was the way with everything.

Johnson had made a few additions and changes to the treehouse in more recent years—in the years, that is to say, following Myrtle’s death on the eve of their anniversary—enclosing the posts to make a garden shed of the space below, and more recently digging a trench across the back yard to pipe in water and electricity and to pipe out sewage, turning the treehouse into something more livable. He had enclosed a cold water shower, too, the kind of thing that he couldn’t have done when Myrt was alive, nor would have had any need to do, except as an antidote for idle hands.

He emptied bottled water into the fishbowl now, filling it to within an inch of the top, and then, in the bucket on the floor, he swirled debris out of the waterweeds before wiggling them down into the gravel in the bottom of the bowl, burying the lead weight wrapped around the base of the clump. Beside the greenery he placed a porcelain castle with an arched tunnel. Even if a man couldn’t
live
in his castle, he could at least pass through it from time to time. He bent over the bucket again to net out the fish, a Chinese telescope moor, uncommonly fat and with bulging eyes. It had been Myrt who had named the fish Septimus, which was a damned good name for a fish. When he released it into the clean water, the sunlight shone on the gold stomach scales and glowed through the jet black translucent veiltail and fins, and the bowl was transformed into the living ornament it was meant to be.