Night Relics (3 page)

“At the old Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. That must have been upwards of forty years ago now.”

“How about when the old lady comes in at the end? If that didn’t bring tears to your eyes …”

“Shameless,” Ackroyd said, “but effective.”

“Der Bingle,” Pomeroy said, sighing.

“Yes indeed.”

“That’s what they called Bing, people who knew him.”

“Ah,” Ackroyd said.

“Der Bingle. It’s German, I guess.”

“Sounds distinctly German, doesn’t it? Lettuce?”

“You don’t mind washing it pretty well, do you? I’m not tolerant of insecticides.”

Pomeroy looked around the living room, calculating the square footage. “Ever think of moving the hot-water heater out of the
kitchen?” he asked. “That would be a selling point, moving it outside.”

“Is that right?” Ackroyd said, running the lettuce under the tap. “You wouldn’t think something that simple …”

“No, I’m serious. Just a couple of changes would make all the difference in the world. I’m talking a few hundred bucks. Wall-to-wall
carpeting, maybe, and white paint on the woodwork. This place wouldn’t last on the market a week with upgrades like that.”

A coughing noise came from the faucet, as if there were
air in the lines. Pomeroy grimaced. “Where do you get your water?” he asked.

“Spring up the hill, mostly. Late in the season or in drought years I draft it from the creek.”

“From the
creek
?”
Pomeroy could see through the window that the property behind the house rose steeply up the hillside. It was green with undergrowth,
most of it shaded by live oak and sycamore and maple. A water tank, maybe a thousand gallons, sat at the end of a dirt path
a hundred feet up the hill. “Must be tough out here—pretty primitive for year-round living.”

“It’s all I know.”

“I’d like a place like this for a weekend getaway. Bottled water all the way. What do you think you’d need out of it?”

“I’ve always gotten what I need out of it.”

“I mean seriously. What kind of offer would I have to make?”

“I wouldn’t sell it.” Ackroyd laid the sandwiches on plates along with two variety-pack bags of potato chips. He poured iced
tea out of a big jar into glasses and carried all of it out to the dining room table.

“Well, like I said out on the porch before we got to talking,” Pomeroy said, “I’d like to make you an offer.”

“I’m afraid it’s a waste of time. Napkin?”

“Thanks.” Pomeroy took a paper napkin from a holder and unfolded it on his lap. “I mean a
serious
offer. What I’d give you on this place would make a healthy down payment on one of those new condos out in Tustin Ranch.
All the amenities right there—stores, jacuzzi, pool. You wouldn’t have to drink water that’s had fish swimming in it. Or worse.”
He opened the sandwich and looked at the lettuce inside. “A condo’s a sound investment.”

“I’ve never been able to think of my home as an investment,” Ackroyd said. “That’s probably a personal failing of mine.”

“Hey,” Pomeroy said, shrugging. “Some people have
no head for business. But then the right kind of money comes along and they learn fast. Crash course. That’s the best kind
of education a man can get. You won’t find it in any of these books.” He gestured at the rows of books, dismissing them all.
Then he waited a moment, giving the old man a chance to chew the idea over along with his sandwich. “What do you say?”

“Pardon me?” He was staring at the photos that hung on the wall above the bookshelves. “I’m afraid my mind wandered.”

“Name your price.”

“My
price
? Somehow what you’re suggesting sounds so exotic that I think we’re speaking different languages.”

He sounded almost testy. Pomeroy nearly laughed out loud. The old man was shrewd as hell; you had to give him that. Pomeroy
winked at him, one salesman to another. Clearly he’d underestimated the old man, sold him short. “Money’s the universal language,”
he said. “But I don’t have to tell
you
that. You’re good.” He shook his head in admiration. “Scotchman in the woodpile somewhere, eh?”

“In the
wood
pile?”

“Look, I’m serious. Quote me a figure. See if you can make me laugh out loud. What? Fifty K? Sixty?”

Ackroyd stood up without saying another word and walked into the kitchen. He was probably thinking about the money now, putting
together a counter offer. Pomeroy would pretend to be shocked at the figure when the old man finally spit it out. The thing
was that old boys like Ackroyd had been out of things for so long that they didn’t know what a dollar was worth when it came
to real estate. You flatter them with the idea that they’re driving a hell of a hard bargain, and when you knuckle under and
pay them off, they think they took you to the cleaners. Car sales was like that:
well, there goes my commission
…. Pomeroy pulled that old chestnut out of the fire every night of the year.

Ackroyd returned, carrying a paper lunch sack.

“All right,” Pomeroy said, “what would it take?”

Ackroyd picked up Pomeroy’s uneaten sandwich and put it into the sack along with the bag of chips. “I’m awfully tired all
of a sudden,” he said, gesturing at the front door.

“What?”

“I’m afraid I need fairly regular naps. I’ve got to leave in a half hour, and I’d like to lie down for a moment first. If
you’d like to take the iced tea with you, I can put it into a jar.”

“No, thanks.” Pomeroy was momentarily confused. The old man ushered him toward the door, showing him out. “Go ahead and sleep
on it, then….”

“Please, Mr. Adams,” Ackroyd said, calling Pomeroy by his current business alias, “I’m not interested in selling my house.
I’ve lived here for upwards of fifty years, and I mean to die here. There are things connecting me to this canyon that would
bore you utterly if I tried to explain them to you, but I’ll guarantee that they’re sufficient to keep me here despite the
lack of amenities, as you put it.”

He smiled briefly as the door swung shut. Pomeroy found himself standing alone on the porch. The old man was serious! He was
apparently a nut. Pomeroy hadn’t pegged him for a nut. He got into his rented Thunderbird and turned out onto the road, pitching
the lunch bag out the window when he was out of sight of the house. Nut or no nut, it was cat-skinning time. If he couldn’t
take out an old fool like Ackroyd, then it was past time to retire.

T
HE WIND WAS STILL BLOWING AS
P
ETER DROVE ALONG
Chapman Avenue, over Orange Hill and down into the suburbs. He turned on the radio, punched through the buttons without listening
to anything, and then turned the radio off again. There was something familiar and comforting this morning about the billboards
and telephone poles and housing tracts, something safe and predictable.

From the top of the dashboard, he picked up the flute he had found on the parlor floor. It belonged to his son David. Peter
had bought it for him in Louisiana a year or so ago. Last Sunday David had brought the flute out to the canyon and had spent
half the afternoon messing around with it, getting down the first few phrases of “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”

So, what had happened? David had dropped it and then gone off without it? But then it would have been lying on the floor throughout
the week, in plain sight.

There must be some easy answer. Perhaps David had laid it down on the fireplace mantel and forgotten about it. Maybe the wind,
or a rat, had knocked it off onto the floor. That was probably it—rats. Rats were to blame for everything—the appearance of
the flute, the hallucination, the crying in the woods, the coffee burning. No doubt rats had also stolen the pocket watch
that Peter had left lying on the front porch railing the night before last. The mayor of the rats was wearing it now, tucked
into a vest pocket.

A car horn honked behind him, and he realized that he
was driving far too slowly, paying no attention. He sped up, thinking suddenly about Beth and about their talk that morning.
The words “confirmed monogamist” rang in his ears again, as jarringly off-key as the flute on the parlor floor. In a way he
had meant the phrase to be funny, but instead he had sounded a little too much like someone striking a holier-than-thou pose,
choosing
, as Beth had put it, to be offended by something. He hadn’t looked at it that way before. It was almost always easier just
to blame your wife.

He and Amanda had agreed to share custody of David, who was ten now. Peter’s move to the canyon was the one thing in the business
that bothered Amanda. She could understand Peter’s wanting to live like a hermit, but David, she said, needed more. David
wasn’t always easy. He could be moody, and in the last year or so, what with the breakup and Peter’s moving out, he had gone
through a sullen phase. Peter’s attempts to fix things with him too often brought silence and shrugs.

On impulse he pulled into the parking lot of a Sprouse Reitz dime store. There were eucalyptus trees and fall flowers growing
in newly built concrete planters, and the stores had a recently tacked-on pastel facade. Peter was surprised to find that
he couldn’t remember when the place had got a face-lift.

Inside the dime store, things were the same as ever. The air smelled of yardage and popcorn. Near the door there were bins
of Halloween candy and racks of plastic masks and wigs and skeleton suits. He looked the stuff over, tempted to buy one of
the skinny rubber chickens that hung by its feet from a clothespin. A woman about seventy years old, very neatly dressed and
with purple-gray hair, stood at the only open register a few feet away. She smiled at him when he inspected the chickens,
as if she thought they were funny, too.

It seemed to him that a dime store wouldn’t be a half bad place to work, wandering around with a feather duster
among knickknacks and bolts of brightly colored cloth, sticking price tags onto glass tumblers and pincushions and putting
in a few hours at the register, shooting the breeze with the occasional customer. It was a sort of haven built of trinkets,
a never-never land where you watched the world slip past beyond plate glass windows. You could live back in the stockroom
among the cardboard cartons, resting your feet on an old desk covered with invoices and with pens advertising wholesale dry
goods.

He caught sight of himself in the mirrored backdrop of a jewelry display, and with his fingers he smoothed out his wind-mussed
hair. Yesterday evening Beth had told him that shaving his mustache had made him resemble Gene Kelly and then had tried to
get him to dance with her to a tape of old Motown songs on the portable cassette player. It turned out that shaving his mustache
didn’t make any difference at all. He still could dance only a sort of two-step that Beth finally began to refer to as the
“Clod.” Gene Kelly, though … He was built about right, although he was a little tall. He tried smiling at himself in the mirror.
Well, maybe with a hat and umbrella, kicking through a puddle …

He gave up and walked toward the rear of the store where there were two long counters full of toys, most of them tossed together,
some of the packages ripped open. Peter picked through them, flipping a Nerf football in his hand. The football wasn’t enough;
there probably wasn’t a kid alive who didn’t already have one. He found a rubber stack of pancakes wearing a hat and carrying
a submachine gun, plenty weird enough to impress the modern child, but he decided he didn’t want that, either.

Then, sorting through a row of plastic revolvers, by accident he found just the thing—something called a Spud Gun, a pistol
that shot pieces of raw potato. There were two of them, dusty and lonely, misplaced behind the six-shooters as if they had
been forgotten there in some more innocent age. Raised plastic letters spelled out the word
“Spuderrific” on the barrel, and there were instructions on the back for loading the things with potato plugs. Feeling lucky
now, he took them up to the counter and handed them to the checker, who pretended to be surprised.

“Robbing the bank?” she asked.

“Brink’s truck,” Peter said.

“I got one of these for my grandson,” she said. “When he was six or seven.”

“Did he like it?”

“He loved it,” she said. “His mother wasn’t crazy about it, though.”

Peter hadn’t thought about that—hundreds of little potato globs stuck to the kitchen wall. It was too late now, though. The
deal was done. She counted out his change and put the guns in a bag, stapling the top shut through the receipt.

“How old is your son?” she asked, as if she wanted to chat, to hold him there a moment longer.

“One’s ten and the other’s six,” Peter said, which was only a small lie, since Bobby wasn’t his son at all yet. Suddenly full
of unanswered questions, he thanked the woman and walked out into the wind.

S
OMEBODY HAD GOTTEN OVER THE FENCE DURING THE
night and glued a bumper sticker to the front door. “Save a lion,” it said, “shoot a developer.” It wasn’t meant to be a
death threat. Klein knew that. It was put there by a local backwoods no-growth hippie who couldn’t think of anything better
to do with his time than screw up another man’s property with petty acts of malice. Since when had
it been a crime to be a building contractor?

People said that Orange County was one big suburb, but the truth was that there were thousands of acres of wilderness left
in the county. You could draw in another half million people and not even crowd them—not any more than they were already crowded.
What the guy with the bumper sticker needed was a dose of reality therapy. Progress actually
was
manifest destiny. There was no stopping it.

You could define it any way you wanted to. You could hate the very idea of it. You could go to community meetings and make
speeches from a plywood podium. Your opinion wasn’t worth a steel slug. The stone-cold fact was that smart people were going
to make a dollar by putting their money on growth. The thing was to figure out how to do it right, without screwing things
up.