In For a Penny (2 page)

I don’t know entirely what all this means. Rethink coffins and bowling balls, that’s one thing. Your wife mightn’t be half as enthusiastic about them as you are. And don’t bury valuables in a coffee can without drawing a map: coffee cans rust to pieces surprisingly quickly, and at least for most of us, so does our memory. Remember that easy money can be a hard life after all, as the song said. When the poet tells you that nothing gold can stay, he’s probably right, but remember that there’s another poet who tells us that the world is always turning toward the morning, and maybe he’s right too. He just sees things from a different point of view, like the possum, and if you can manage it, it’s not a bad perspective to cultivate. As for phone calls out of the void, I have no advice for you at all, except that you should be leery about who you reveal them to, Freudians included.

James Blaylock
Orange, California
January, 2003

i
t was evening, half past five on a late autumn Thursday, and the sun had already gone down on the changing season. The homely smell of wood smoke from fireplace chimneys lingered in the air of the lamplit neighborhood, and there was the smell of damp vegetation from yesterday’s rain. Nina, Art and Beth’s five-year-old daughter, was at a friend’s house where she had stayed for dinner despite its being a school night, and Art was on a mission to pick her up and haul her home while Beth fixed their own supper of steamed crab legs and drawn butter, food that no right-minded child of five would eat, any more than she’d eat onions or mushrooms or a fish head at the Chinese restaurant.

He opened the car door and sat down on the cold upholstery, and in that moment, abruptly and incongruously, there came into his mind the starkly clear picture of a possum crossing a road, illuminated by a car’s headlights. Just as quickly the image was gone, as if he had caught a second’s worth of a television program while switching through the channels. He looked out through the windshield at the empty street, his thoughts interrupted and scattered.

As he drove, he recalled the image clearly, rerunning it in his mind out of curiosity—a dark grove of some sort, the weedy dirt shoulder of the road, the big possum angling across the asphalt, caught for a moment in his headlights as it scurried toward the shrubbery on the far side. He rolled the window down an inch to let in the night air and headed down Cambridge Street toward Fairhaven Avenue, barely seeing the human shadows in the silent cars that passed him, bound for their own lighted living rooms and fireplaces and suppers.

At the stop sign opposite the cemetery he waited for a car to swing past in front of him, and then he turned left onto Fairhaven, remembering suddenly that he was supposed to stop at the market for a container of sour cream for the baked potatoes. Thinking about it, his mind drifted back on course, which at this time of night inevitably meant food, and he realized that he was ravenously hungry and that the evening ahead looked to him like a paid vacation.

Fairhaven was dark, with only a few lights glowing in the cemetery chapel. His headlights illuminated the turned earth of the first rows of the orange grove on his left and the shadowy oleander bushes that hedged the shoulder on the right. And just then something appeared ahead of him, moving across the road. He braked the car, slowing down more out of amazement than necessity: a big possum had come out of the grove and was running with a heavy gait toward the oleanders, its fur showing silver in the headlights. In a moment the animal had disappeared in the night.

A horn honked behind him, and he accelerated, realizing that he had come to a full stop there in the middle of the road, and for a moment he was so addled that he couldn’t recall his destination. The thought came to him that he should pull over and go back on foot to see if he could find the possum, just to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it, but he gave the idea up as lunacy and drove on across Tustin Street and into the neighborhood on the far side, slowly returning to his senses.

. . .

“So you didn’t get the sour cream?” Beth asked him, setting the big plate of crab legs on the table. She poured him a glass of white wine as he hacked open his baked potato.

“I was too … shook up, I guess.”

“By a possum? You didn’t
hit
it, did you?”

“Heck no. I was nowhere near it. It was …
seeing
it, you know, after what happened when I got into the car. I don’t think you’re following what I’m saying. I’m not talking about a simple
déjà vu
or something.”

Nina came into the kitchen, dressed in her pajamas, skinny as an orphan. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes. “I have homework,” she said. She held out an empty shoebox.

“In kindergarten you have homework?” Art picked up a crab leg and pulled it open along the slit that Beth had cut into it with a knife.

“She has to make a collection,” Beth said. “Mrs. Barnes was talking about it at back-to-school night, remember?”

“Sure,” Art said. “I think she told everyone it shouldn’t be bugs.”

“Nothing dead,” Beth said, taking the butter out of the microwave and sitting down. “You don’t have to kill things to have a collection.”

“How about leaves?” Art asked helpfully. He doubled a long piece of crab and dipped it into the drawn butter right up to his fingertips. “Do leaves count as dead?”

“Leafs?” Nina wrinkled up her nose in the style of a rabbit. “What’s that thing?”

“That thing is a crab leg,” Art said. “Hey! I’ll tell you what. How about a crab leg collection?”

Nina frowned and shook her head in small jerks. “Those smell.”

“And they’re dead,” Beth added. The telephone rang, and Beth stood up again to answer it.

“Anthony Collier,” Art said, looking up sharply. The name had simply popped into his head, arriving out of nowhere, like a light blinking on.

“Wait,” Beth told him, waving him silent and picking up the receiver, clearly assuming that he was starting to tell her something about his old friend Anthony, who had moved to New York the previous winter. “Hello,” she said, and then listened, double-taking just a little bit. She handed him the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “Anthony Collier,” she said.

“Hey,” Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.

“Wow,” she said.
“That
was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony.”

“Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum.”

“I think feathers,” Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.

. . .

For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the
meaning
of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of … other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessed—ghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.

During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn’t guessed. The information had come from
outside
of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.

He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn’t been there, but she’d
heard
him come up with Anthony’s name out of the blue.

He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn’t answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina’s room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.

“Five of spades,” he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from
Jeopardy!
start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.

“Read me one,” Nina whispered, pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.

“You already had a story,” Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. “This is a good collection,” he said.

“It’s only one. Mom says one’s not a collection.”

“Maybe we should go feather collecting.”

“Do you know where?” she asked.

But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind’s eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the road—the angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows. …

Something struck him then, something he hadn’t thought of before.

“Do I know where what?” he asked, finally reacting to Nina’s question.

“Where there’s feathers?”

“Sure. I know a place. We’ll go looking.” He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching
Jeopardy!
He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren’t up his alley. “Listen to this,” he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. “The two incidents aren’t the same thing.”

“Okay,” she said, her eyes on the television screen.

“With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the
same time.”

“I still say it’s coincidence.”

“That’s all right. It might be. But listen to what I’m telling you. With the possum it was different. I
predicted
the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared.”

“I do see the difference. I don’t know what it means, but I see what you’re saying. The possum is kind of … psychic.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Actually they’re both kind of psychic, aren’t they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence.”

“I don’t know what I think. What’s the Santa Maria?”

“What?” he asked, utterly baffled by this.

“The name of Columbus’s ship,” she said. “Explorers for six hundred.”

“Oh.” He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. “You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make
two
weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence.”

“The Final Jeopardy subject is British History,” Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.

“Oliver Cromwell,” Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn’t guessed. He hadn’t had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. “That’s it again,” he said. “At least I think it is.” Instantly he had come to doubt himself.
Was
this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?

There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: “This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and …”

Art didn’t hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. “Now you’re giving me the creeps,” she said.

. . .

On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn’t make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn’t speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight o’clock he shouted “Jimmy Carter!” but it was the Fireman’s Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.