In For a Penny (18 page)

. . .

It had been forty years ago that Johnson had been working in his garage shop, stacking boards and drinking coffee, when he had abruptly gotten the idea of building his own coffin, or better yet casket, just like the tattooed cannibal in the story: a simple wooden box, without the morbid shape of old-fashioned wooden coffins, that would function during his life as a toolbox. He envisioned compartments for hammers and saws and planes, for squares and levels and a set of bits and augers; cubbyholes for nails and screws and wood dough; slots and panels that could be arranged and rearranged over the passing years until, when the sun was setting at last, metaphorically speaking, he could remove the interior complications more or less altogether, leaving only a nook and a cranny for the few things, beside himself, that he wanted to take along to the afterlife.

He had instantly pictured the finished box in his head: its length, its width and depth, the arrangement of tools, the sliding panels and cubbyholes. And in that same instant he had picked out what he would take: the several books that he would want in the end, what he and Myrt liked to call their desert island books, which, along with a cribbage board, a deck of cards, a bottle of sherry, and a couple of glasses would very nearly do the trick. A bowl of popcorn suggested itself, but he couldn’t see any way to make it work.

. . .

The fish moved lazily around its kingdom now, going to the surface to gulp air, swimming awkwardly in its obese way, peering myopically out at the world. “Why
two
glasses?” he asked the fish aloud, watching it wiggle its way through the arch of the castle. “In case rigor mortis should set in,” he answered, laughing shamelessly at the old joke.

Watching the fish swim through the clear water, he noticed a gently moving reflection in the glass itself now, although when he tried to make it out it disappeared. When he looked beyond it again, focusing on the now-hovering fish, the reflection reappeared, a shadowy bending motion, as of someone reaching down into a trunk or a box to retrieve something, and then standing and turning away. He looked behind him, and through the window saw that a limb from the avocado tree was bowing in the afternoon breeze, but he could see nothing in it that suggested the reflection in the glass. When he turned back to the bowl, Septimus was still hovering in the water beyond the open arch of the castle, looking back out at him, but the sun seemed to strike the glass from a slightly lower angle, and the reflection was gone.

. . .

On that morning forty years ago he had come into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, where he found Myrtle washing dishes at the sink. In an ill-thought-out rush of enthusiasm he had told her about the “box,” as if she would be placated by the euphemism. She hadn’t even looked up: no shock of horror, no gasp of surprise, certainly no notion that his idea had any value. She had simply gone on with the dishes as if she hadn’t heard him. He laughingly mentioned the two glasses and the sherry in order to work the rigor mortis joke on her and lighten the leaden silence, but it hadn’t helped, and her wordless dismissal of the subject had lasted the rest of her life.

Afterward he had gone walking by himself in the neighborhood, designing the fine points of the box in his head: the joinery and the finish, how he would cleat the outside with cross members, top and bottom both, to keep the planks from cupping over the years. He had some heavy brass screws that would make a nice pattern against the oiled oak. Beyond the exposed screws, however, and the finger-jointed corners and the cleating, there would be no ornamentation at all. When it came to the afterlife, fancy gewgaws were like coals to Newcastle, or worse, shameless marks of vanity. The same could be said about a toolbox, which was meant to be functional rather than decorative.

On his walk he had gone some distance beyond his usual haunts, and could not recognize the name of the tree-shaded street that he found himself on. He was on the point of turning around to retrace his steps when he saw an open garage door. In the dim interior a sheet of plywood was set up across a couple of big cardboard boxes. Odds and ends of old junk lay on the floor, and although there was no sign posted, and no one visible inside, from the look of things it was pretty clearly a garage sale. He stepped in out of the sunlight, and right off he found a half dozen things to buy: a keyhole saw, an old bottle jack, some heavy brass strap hinges for a nickel a throw that even back then were worth five bucks. They were more showy than a piano hinge, but they were solid enough to work first rate on the casket lid.

At about the time he had these treasures collected, an old woman came out from inside the house with a shoe box full of barware that had seen its day. Among the muddlers and swizzle sticks and cork pullers was a single sherry glass, lead crystal etched with a likeness of Queen Isabella of Spain. The glass held perhaps three ounces, and had an octagonal base and a gold rim, the gold worn thin from long years of use. Johnson bought it at once, thinking about the afterlife again. Of course in time he would want
two
of them, one for himself and one for Myrt. If she made it to the next place before he did, then he would bring the glasses and the sherry and the rest of it along and catch up with her there. If he went on ahead first, then he would be ready for her when she arrived.

And of course buying the
single
glass right now pretty much justified his building the casket—which, he would readily admit, tempted the hell out of fate—because the single glass answered that particular superstitious dread with a counter-element of superstition: you could safely tempt fate, he reasoned, by building your own coffin, if you challenged fate to find you a matching sherry glass. Fate wasn’t always dealt the high card; like anyone else, it had to wait for the aces to come around.

Even the likeness of Queen Isabella was a kind of portent, or at least it was another piece that fit in with the growing puzzle of their lives: Myrt enjoyed a glass of sherry, a habit she had acquired years ago during their European travel, and Johnson had developed a taste for the stuff himself, at first out of deference to her. In Barcelona they had found a dusty old rectangular bottle in a market off a narrow alley, estimating from the layer of dust and from the price that the contents must somehow be remarkable. At their
pension
, Johnson had accidentally dropped it onto the stones of the courtyard, and the wine had certainly smelled as good as it must have tasted. Myrt had soaked the label off the shards and pressed it in a big dictionary. Much later yet—twenty years? twenty-five?—Johnson had found an identical bottle on the shelf of a Vietnamese liquor store in Little Saigon, entirely by chance, the squatty green bottle catching his eye. He had brought the wine home and given it to her with a bouquet of roses, and Myrt had dug the old label out of the dictionary to compare it.

It was still faintly scented with sherry after the long years, and had called up memories. Swept with nostalgia, Johnson had shown her the garage sale sherry glass, making up a stretcher about why and when he had bought it. Having only one of them, they had found two other glasses to toast with, and early the next morning, while Myrtle was still sleeping, he had retrieved the sherry glass from where it still sat downstairs and returned it to its lonesome double niche among the tools in the box, sliding the little protective panel door closed in front of it.

. . .

Nowadays his shop was closed up, locked with a big padlock. The few tools he needed for routine maintenance he kept below the treehouse in the renovated garden shed. The key to the shop padlock, along with his long disused house keys, also lay in a niche in the casket, or more accurately in the toolbox, since he was still living and breathing. Over these last few years he had become a man who carried with him only a single key—only the one key for the old Cadillac, which with a certain artistic foresight he’d had re-keyed a decade ago so that the ignition key and the trunk key were the same. It was true that he had a copy in a magnetic Hide-a-Key box hidden beneath the bumper, but a copy wasn’t the thing itself, and anyway the magnetic box might have lost its hold and fallen onto the roadway years ago, as often happened.

Septimus nosed the top of the water, and he pinched some flakes out of the canister of food and sprinkled them into the bowl. Someone had told him that a goldfish’s stomach was only as big as its eye, in contrast to people, whose eyes were often bigger than their stomachs. Whether any of this was true he didn’t know, but it
was
true that a well fed fish could easily live for a month or more without food, and for that he was grateful, because he wasn’t such a recluse as all that: if he were to pass away—
when
, that is to say—the postman at least would find the mail piling up in the box out front, and one thing would lead to another.

He picked up the empty bucket and went out, hauling it down the stairs that wrapped around the tree trunk and setting it in the shed below. Then he ascended the stairs again, stopping for a breather on the first landing. His heart fluttered like a small and helpless bird, and he felt the familiar faintness coming on, profound enough so that he sat down hard on the plank stair and focused all of his energy simply on the moment, on his own being and on the sun-dappled shadows that moved roundabout him. He leaned his head against the railing post, breathing in the scent of weathered redwood mingled with the sharp bay leaf smell of dead avocado leaves. After a time the pain in his arm faded and he stood up again, got his bearings, and climbed to the tiny verandah, where he entered the small house, stepping onto the little piece of Turkish carpet and lying down on the bed. He gazed again at the sunlit fishbowl, listening to the rustling of leaves in the afternoon wind. It occurred to him now that his existence had largely been that of a beachcomber on the lookout for seashells and flotsam, finding lucky odds and ends by chance up near the high tide line, as he had found the first sherry glass or the second bottle in the market, and that although the swiftly passing days were slipping away from him at last, they hadn’t failed to cast up their small bounty of souvenirs. He closed his eyes finally and drifted off to sleep, the noise of the wind dwindling in his ears.

He awakened when the sun was lower in the sky, and the small room had gotten dim. He lay peacefully, watching the curious shadowy movement in the glass of the goldfish bowl again, and again there was something about the movement that didn’t look like leaves and branches at all, that had something of a human shape and purpose, like successive moving images of someone, or an infinity of someones, returning again and again to perform a small task, bending and reaching and straightening up like the staccato moving images in an endlessly repeated film strip.

Johnson’s heart had evened out again, although he still felt weak. He stood up, getting his sea legs under him, and clicked on the gooseneck lamp that lit the fishbowl. At once the moving shadows disappeared, the illuminated glass harboring no reflections. There were a couple of hours at most before dark, and he had some little distance to travel before he could sleep—not miles to go, like the poet, but if he was any judge of the ocean, the tide was making, and wouldn’t wait for him any more than it would wait for the next man. He descended the stairs and entered the garden shed, where he lifted his carpenter’s tools out of the box, laying them carefully on the several shelves lining the wall. He found his house key at the bottom and put it into his pocket along with the key to the Cadillac, then walked out onto the back lawn, finding with unexpected happiness that the autumn sun had a certain amount of warmth in it. The fig tree was shedding enormous yellow leaves, one of which drifted to the ground beside him as if to illustrate the passing of the season.

He crossed to the carport, looking at the closed-up house, the clapboards layered with dust, and he swung open the little gate, heading out toward the front sidewalk, closing the gate behind him. He opened the driver’s side door on the Cadillac, leaned in, and slipped the key into the ignition, then closed the car up. Out front, the neighborhood was going about its usual Sunday afternoon business. He waved cheerfully at a neighbor, who, after a seemingly puzzled moment, waved back at him, and he stood for a moment to watch a dozen crows hard at work in the branches of a pecan tree across the street, the broken husks of the pecans littering the sidewalk below, staining the concrete with brown streaks as they had done every autumn without fail.

He turned to look at the front of his house, taking it all in: the broad front porch with its rusted porch lamp and swing with rusted chains, the overgrown bushes in the flowerbeds, the big glass picture window with dusty and sun-faded curtains long ago drawn across it. He climbed up onto the porch and fitted the key into the doorknob, pushed the door open, and, after locking the door behind him again, walked into the kitchen, breathing in the dusty, closed-up scent of the place. He half expected the kitchen clock to have stopped at some defining moment, but it hadn’t, and the seconds ticked away as ever. The clock was a white porcelain Delft affair with blue Dutch children wearing wooden shoes standing in front of a blue Dutch windmill—something Myrt had found in one of the antique shops that she had frequented downtown. The clock’s old thread-wrapped cord wasn’t in the least frayed, a testimony to better days, when the things of man were built to outlive their owners.

He had felt that way about the casket when he had built it, and he still did. Despite its destination, there was no reason that the joinery shouldn’t be tight and square and the materials first-rate. He had driven into Los Angeles, to a big lumberyard that sold hardwoods, where he had picked out quarter-sawn oak planks without any checking or splitting. They had cost him plenty, in time and money both. He had hand rubbed tung oil into the wood to finish it, renewing it every New Year’s Day through all the years since, making up excuses for the hour or so he spent in the shop while Myrt watched the Rose Parade. All in all it was a shame that a man’s coffin couldn’t be left to later generations, like a well-built chair. But like the man himself, it was a piece of furniture that was meant to be buried.
Time and dust
, he thought, running his finger over the Formica countertop and smiling at his own joke,
happen to us all.