In For a Penny (8 page)

The sound of the loudspeaker squawked again from up the road, breaking in on his thoughts. If the truck made the same circuit it had before, it wouldn’t take thirty seconds for it to get down here. …

He climbed in beside her and backed out, heading downhill and around the corner onto Grizzly Peak, where right away he saw activity in the street ahead – cars stopped, uniformed men milling around, leaning in open windows to say something to the evacuees. The first of the cars in line made a U-turn and motored back up hill, throttling past them. The driver’s face, visible in the glow of the instrument panel, was full of a visible rage, as if he had just been insulted beyond words.

“What the hell is
this
now?” Ed asked, but Lisa didn’t respond. The parakeets chattered happily in the back seat. He rolled down the window and nodded at an officer, apparently a fireman, who stepped off the curb and approached the Escort.

“You folks can go home,” he said. “Excitement’s over. Sorry for the panic.”

“It’s
over?”
Ed asked. “What the hell was it?” All that for nothing, he thought. But then he glanced over at Lisa and realized that it hadn’t been for nothing; he wasn’t that lucky. It might be the end of the world, one way or another. The aliens had won without firing a shot. “What was all that racket back in the hills?”

“Some kind of performance artists from Cal.” The man shrugged. His face was bland. Clearly he wasn’t happy to be up this early either, and he looked at Ed’s bowling shirt now, as if he didn’t quite understand why Ed would want to wear it over the top of his sweater like that.

“Artists?” Ed asked. This was astonishing.

“Yeah. They didn’t file a permit. Had a bunch of sound equipment and some kind of high-tech holographic stuff that they trucked back into the hills on an access road. Just a prank.”

Lisa laughed suddenly, shaking her head as if she’d just figured out the punch line to a joke. Apparently mystified, the fireman ducked a little in order to look in at her.

“It’s October thirtieth.” she said, and laughed again, shaking her head as if it beat all.

Ed patted her on the thigh good-naturedly. Clearly she’d snapped. And it was his fault, of course. His response to an apparent alien invasion had been to attack his own wife in an insidious and incomprehensible way.

“I’m sorry?” the fireman asked.

“October thirtieth, 1938-that’s the night Orson Welles pulled the War of the Worlds prank.”

The man looked as if he’d been pole-axed. “The tripods thing! He did that radio show! Well, I’ll be damned. …”

He laughed now and stepped away from the car, motioning Ed forward. Other cars had stopped behind them, and the Escort was blocking traffic. They made an easy U-turn and headed back uphill, Lisa still chuckling to herself. Through the open window, Ed heard the fireman shouting the news to one of his cohorts, the mystery solved to everyone’s satisfaction. He swung the car back up into the neighborhood, and between two houses he got a glimpse of the eastern sky, ablaze with color. The tall houses and curb trees shaded the streets and sidewalks, though, and there was still a lot of darkness in the morning.

He sensed that Lisa was looking at him, and he glanced in her direction as if he were checking his passenger-side blind spot, even though there was no lane there. In fact she
was
staring at him, an expectant grin on her face, as if she had seen the joke and wondered if he had, and when their eyes met, she burst into laughter again. “You’ve got to admit it’s funny,” she said, shaking her head in amused wonder. “The prank, I mean.” The parakeets in the back seat took up their merry chatter again, as if they, at least, were cheerful enough to admit anything.

Ed tried to laugh, but the sound he made was inhuman, and he was abruptly silent. The drive home, only half a mile, seemed an eternity now, and yet he dreaded arriving. But there was the bottom of their street just ahead, and as he turned the car toward home, he saw in the early morning twilight the Bords’ farthest-flung trash can lying in the gutter. Scattered, car-flattened trash littered the street above it. He glanced at Lisa again. She had a beatific half-smile on her face that was impossible to read. He slowed down a little as they passed the fallen trash can, then pointed toward the hills, hunkering down and looking out through the windshield. “What’s
that?”
he asked, knowing exactly what it was – a news helicopter sweeping low over the woods, getting the story.

Lisa peered up through the window, though, turning her head away, and at once he bent over and squinted into the side mirror, looking back down at the galvanized mouth of the Bords’ trash can, facing uphill so that it caught the first rays of the morning sun like a glowing metal halo. Inside the half-filled can lay the discarded bowling ball, a shining black hole against the white aurora of a kitchen trash bag.

t
he abandoned house was boarded up, its chimney fallen, the white paint on the clapboards weathered to the color of an old ghost. It was hidden from the street by two low-limbed sycamores in the front yard and by an overgrown oleander hedge covered in pink and white flowers. Alan stood by his car in the driveway, sheltered from the street in the empty and melancholy afternoon, half listening to the drone of an unseen airplane and to the staccato clamor of a jackhammer, that stopped and started in a muted racket somewhere blocks away in the nearby neighborhood.

More than twenty years had passed since Alan had last driven out to his childhood home. A year or so after he had married Susan the two of them had stopped on the road, and he had climbed out of the car with no real idea what he hoped to find. A new family had moved in by then – his own parents having sold the house and moved north a year before – and the unrecognizable children’s toys on the lawn were disconcerting to him, and so he had climbed back into the car and driven away.

His marriage to Susan was one of the few things in his life that he had done without hesitation, and that had turned out absolutely right. A few days ago she had gone back east for two weeks to visit her aunts in Michigan, taking along their son Tyler, who was starting college in two months in Ann Arbor. Alan had stayed home looking forward to the peace and quiet, a commodity that had grown scarce over the years. But somewhere along the line he had lost his talent for solitude, and the days of empty stillness had filled him with a sense of loss that was almost irrational, as if Susan and Tyler been gone months instead of days, or as if, like the old house in front of him now, he was coming to the end of something.

He walked into the back yard and tried the rear door, which of course was locked, and then tried without success to peer through a boarded-up kitchen window. He looked back up the driveway to make sure he was unseen, but just then a man came into view, walking along the shoulder of the road, heading uphill past the house. Alan moved back out of sight, waiting for an interminable couple of minutes before looking out once more. Hurrying now, he pried two of the boards off with his hands, wiggling the nails loose and setting the boards aside on the ground. He put his face to the dusty glass and peered through, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness within. There was a skylight overhead, which, like the oleander hedge out front, hadn’t been part of the house twenty years ago. Filtered sunlight shone through its litter of leaves and dirt so that the interior of the kitchen slowly appeared out of the darkness like a photograph soaking in developer. He had been afraid that he would find the house depressingly vandalized, but it wasn’t; he stared nostalgically at the familiar chrome cabinet pulls and the white-painted woodwork and the scalloped moldings, remembering the breakfast nook and curio shelves, the dining room beyond, the knotty pine bookshelves topped with turned posts that screened the hallway leading to his bedroom.

He stepped away from the window and walked along the side of the property, between the house and the fence, toward where his bedroom stood – or what had been his bedroom all those years ago. There were no boards on the window, but the view was hidden by curtains. He rejected the idea of breaking the window, and instead retraced his steps, his hands in his pockets, careful not to look over the fence, beyond which lay the back yards of houses built a decade ago. In his day there had been a farmhouse on several acres, belonging to an old childless couple named Prentice who had the remnants of a grove of walnuts and a chicken coop and goats. There had been fruit trees on their property, peaches and Santa Rosa plums that he had eaten his share of.

He paused in the shade of a big silk oak tree near the garden shed in the back yard and stood listening to the breeze rustle the leaves, hearing again the distant clattering echo of the jackhammer. The heavy grapevines along the fence hadn’t been pruned back in years, and the air was weighted with the smell of concord grapes, overripe and falling in among the vines to dry in the summer heat. The August afternoon was lonesome and empty, and the rich smell of the grapes filled him with the recollection of a time when he’d had no real knowledge that the hours and days were quietly slipping away, bartered for memories.

The shed at the back of the garage was ramshackle and empty except for scattered junk, its door long ago fallen off and only a single rusted hinge left as a reminder that it had once had a door at all. He remembered that there had been a brick pad in front of the door, but the bricks were gone, and there was nothing but compressed dirt. Inside, a short wooden shelf held a couple of broken clay pots, and on the wall below the shelf hung a single ancient aluminum lawn chair with a woven nylon seat. Alan was certain he remembered that very chair, in considerably better shape, hanging in this same place thirty years ago. On impulse he stepped into the shed, took the chair down, and unfolded it, wiping off dust and cobwebs before walking out under the tree, where he put the chair down in the shade and sat in it, letting his weight down carefully. The nylon webbing was frayed with age, and the aluminum was bent and weakened at the joints, but the seat held, and he relaxed and surveyed the back yard, feeling a sense of invitation, of growing familiarity. Now that the house was sold and abandoned, soon to be torn down, it was his as much as it was anyone’s, and it seemed to him as if the years had passed in the blink of an eye, the house having waited patiently for his return.

The quarter acre yard was smaller than he remembered, although it was immense by southern California standards, and the untended Bermuda grass lawn, flanked by now-weedy flowerbeds, stretched away toward the back fence and garden as ever, with the same orange trees and the big avocado tree that had shaded it since as early as he could remember. On impulse he stood up and walked to the edge of the lawn, where he pushed aside the high brown grass with the toe of his shoe until he found the first of the brick stepping stones that led out to the back garden. He recalled the countless times he had clipped away the grass that had overgrown the bricks, like a gardener edging headstones in a cemetery – an idea that was almost funny, since he had in fact buried something beneath this very stepping stone, which had seemed to him as a child to be permanently set in the lawn, like a benchmark.

When he was a kid he had put together little treasures, collections of marbles and pieces of quartz crystal and small toys that he buried inside foil-wrapped coffee cans around the back yard. The first of his treasures he had buried right here. And now, within a matter of weeks, bulldozers would level the house and grade the yard, and that would be the end of any buried treasures.

He bent over and yanked at the Bermuda grass, pulling out tufts of it in order to expose the edges of the brick. The roots were heavy, a tangled mass that had grown between and around the bricks, packing them together so tightly that they might have been set in concrete. He walked back to the garden shed and looked at the remains of old tools that lay scattered inside: a broken spade, the blade of a hoe, a bamboo rake with most of the tines snapped off.

He picked up the spade, which had about a foot of splintered handle, and went back out to the stepping stone where he slipped the blade in along the edge of the brick, leaning into it, pushing with his foot until he levered the brick out of its hole. The other bricks followed easily now, leaving a three inch deep square, walled and floored and criss-crossed with tangled white roots. Grasping the broken shovel handle he hacked through them, tearing clumps of roots and grass away with his hands, exposing the packed dirt underneath.

After scraping and hacking away an inch or so of soil he unearthed a rusty ring of metal – the top of a coffee can. A big shred of foil, stained gold, lay three-quarters buried in the orange-brown dirt, and he pulled it loose, the dirt collapsing into what must have been the vacancy left when the can had rusted away. Almost immediately he found a tiny porcelain dog – a basset hound that his mother had bought for him as a remembrance of their own basset, which had died when Alan was four or five years old. He tried to recall the dog’s name, but it wouldn’t come to him, and his losing the name filled him with sadness. It occurred to him that he couldn’t actually recall the living dog at all, but had only a memory built up out of a few of his parent’s stories, which had themselves been only memories.

He polished the dirt from the porcelain and set the figurine aside on the lawn. The wind rose just then, and the leaves overhead stirred with a sibilant whispering, and for a time the afternoon was utterly silent aside from the wind-animated noises. Fallen leaves rose from the lawn and tumbled toward the fence, and he heard a distant creaking noise, like a door opening, and the low muttering sound of animals from somewhere off to the east.