The Paper Grail (2 page)

Occasional mailboxes appeared along the ocean side of the road, marking the driveways to isolated houses on the bluffs. Uneasily Howard started watching for Graham’s house, matching landmarks along the highway with the little symbols on the pencil-sketched map on his dashboard. He remembered the house fairly clearly from his stay there years ago, and even more clearly from his dreams, where, because of some trick of dream architecture, Graham’s house and the old stone mill were in some subtle way the same thing.

He drove straight past it, not seeing the fence-post mailbox or the weedy gravel drive until it was too late. Immediately the highway twisted around and began climbing, making it impossible to turn around. Somehow, missing the driveway didn’t bother him. It was almost a relief, and he realized that the house filled him with an indeterminate sense of foreboding, like heavy weather pending on a muggy and silent afternoon.

He slowed the truck, though, and turned off the highway, up Albion Ridge Road, stopping at a little grocery store with a pair of rusty old gas pumps out front. Far below the ridge, the Albion River wound down out of the coast range. The north coast was in the middle of a long drought, and the river was a muddy trickle. On the bank sat a campground, nearly empty, with a dirt road running through it, leading beneath the bridge and down to a deserted beach that was strewn with driftwood and kelp. It looked like a good place to go shelling, especially this time of the year, when the first of the big north swells dragged the ocean bottom and threw seashells and long-sunken flotsam onto the rocky beaches.

He thought about spending the night at the campground. Maybe it was too late to stop and see old Graham that afternoon, anyway. The old man might easily be doubtful about strangers in pickup trucks appearing out of the fog so late in the day.
Howard would call back down to the house in order to make an appointment—for tomorrow noon, say. He felt grimy and salty, and his clothes smelled like fish bait. Tomorrow morning he could find a laundromat in Mendocino, and then backtrack the ten miles to Graham’s house. The plan sounded fine to him, very rational, except that he knew he was simply avoiding things, and was beginning to feel as if the north coast, like the two poles of a magnet, was conspiring to attract and repel him about equally.

The gas station was actually a sort of country store, covered in rough-cut redwood planks and with a few chain-sawed burl sculptures out front that had turned gray in the weather. Old macramé and bead curtains covered the windows, which were dusty and strung with cobwebs and dead flies. The junk food in the rack on the counter was a little disappointing—carob brownies and sticky-looking granola bars in plastic wrap, all of it sweetened with fruit juice instead of sugar. It was guaranteed to be organic, put together by a local concern called Sunberry Farms. It certainly
looked
organic, especially the carob, which might as easily have been dirt.

There wasn’t a Twinkie in sight, so he grabbed a pack of gum and one of the brownies and laid them on the counter. Gas was nearly a dollar and a half a gallon, and his old Chevy Cheyenne drank it like champagne. The attendant stood out by the truck, talking to a man carrying a tackle box, who set the box down and held his hands apart, obviously telling a fish story. Nobody was in any hurry up here, which satisfied Howard entirely. It seemed to be the first time in months, maybe years, that he wanted to be exactly where he was, drunk on the weather and the solitude and the sound of the sea.

He found a wire rack of postcards and window decals, and he sorted through them, pulling out a half dozen decals that advertised north coast sights—the Skunk Train, Shipwreck Aquarium, the Winchester Mystery House, Noyo Harbor. It didn’t matter to him that he hadn’t been to most of these places. What he wanted was to glue decals all over his truck and camper shell windows. He had a couple dozen of them already, from places in Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico. Soon he’d be out of room, and would have to start layering the decals, perhaps covering just the inessential edges and corners at first, and then ultimately losing one after another of them altogether. Once he had gotten started on it a couple of months ago, it had become a sort of compulsion, and he had come to believe in the virtues of excess, almost as if someday he would
reach a sort of mystical decal threshold, and something would happen.

Normally he avoided any decal that didn’t advertise a place. He didn’t want slogans or political statements or any indication that he meant anything consistent. Obvious meaning would subvert the entire effort, and he’d have to scrape the whole mess off with a razor blade. Up until now he never bought too many at one time. The thing shouldn’t be rushed. There was something about the air up here, though, that overrode that instinct, and he found that within moments he was holding a whole sheaf of the things. He picked out one last decal of a comical pelican, which he bought as a souvenir of the bird he’d shared his anchovies with. If there was any meaning in that, no one except him would be able to guess it out.

He wandered up the center aisle of the little store, toward a display of fishing tackle and rental poles on the back wall. Thumbtacked to a piece of corkboard beneath the carded fishing tackle was a faded and dog-eared bumper sticker advertising a local roadside attraction. It had holes in the corners so that it could be wired to your bumper while you weren’t looking. In small letters it read, “Honk if you’ve seen,” and then below, in larger letters, “The Museum of Modern Mysteries.” Alongside was a sketchy illustration of ghosts flitting through a redwood grove with a shadowy automobile running along below, the front end of the thing lost in the foggy night. Howard unpinned it, instantly losing interest in his hand full of decals.

There was the scraping of shoe soles at the door, and Howard turned to find the attendant sliding in behind the counter. The man looked doubtfully at the brownie, pushing it with his finger. “This yours?” he asked, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

Howard nodded, suddenly regretting it. The thing cost nearly a dollar, the price of two decals. “Is this bumper sticker for sale?” Howard held it up for the man to see.

“Oh, that,” the man said, sitting down on a stool. “That’s a couple years old. It ain’t no good. Place went broke.”

Howard wondered for a moment whether his question had been answered and then decided that it hadn’t been. “Don’t want to sell it, do you?” He tried not to sound too anxious. The man was right, from his point of view, and was clearly having a hard time putting a price on a scrap of old faded paper.

“Used to have a decal, too.” He leaned heavily on the first syllable of the word and nodded at the wire rack.

“Don’t have one now, do you?”

“Nope,” the man said. “Place went bust.”

Howard widened his eyes, as if in surprise that such a place as a spirit museum could go bust. “People don’t much believe in ghosts anymore,” he said, trying to make it sound noncommittal, as if he were ready to believe in whatever the attendant believed, and blame the rest of the world for believing something else and causing trouble.

“People don’t know from ghosts.” The man switched on a portable television behind the counter. A game show appeared on the screen—a family of six wearing funny hats and jitterbugging furiously in front of a washer and dryer hung with enormous price tags.

The sound of the television ruined the atmosphere, and Howard was suddenly desperate to leave. He set his credit card down on the counter along with the decals and made one last try at the bumper sticker. “I’d be glad to buy the sticker,” he said.

“Won’t do you no good.” The man stared hard at his credit card, as if Howard had handed him something inexplicable—a ham sandwich or a photograph of the Eiffel Tower. He read the name several times, looking at Howard’s face, and then checked the number against a little book of bad-risk numbers shoved in alongside the cash register. “Barton,” he said. “You ain’t any relation …” He looked closely at Howard’s face again and then smiled broadly. “Sure you are!”

“He’s my uncle,” Howard said. “On my father’s side.” It was no good to lie. Now he would have to pay triple for the bumper sticker. Howard’s Uncle Roy had founded and owned the Museum of Modern Mysteries and then had gone broke with it. Howard had never even been there, although he had always loved the idea of it. And now, these years later, here was a long-lost bumper sticker advertising the place. Clearly he had to buy it as a memento. The man knew that now. He sat there as if thinking about it, about soaking Howard for the rectangle of sun-faded paper.

“Roy Barton,” he said, shaking his head. “That old son of a gun. Hell,
take
the damned thing. You going up to his place now?”

“That’s right,” Howard said, surprised. “I’m up here on business, mostly.”

“Roy Barton’s, or your own?”

“My own, actually. I haven’t seen Roy for a few years. I don’t know what kind of business he’s in now.”

The man gave him a curious look, as if Uncle Roy were in some sort of business that didn’t bear discussion. Then he said, “Roy Barton’s pretty much in business with the world. Nobody’d be surprised if your business and his business didn’t cross paths down the line. He used to call himself an ‘entrepreneur of the spirit.’ And by God he ain’t far wrong. He’ll liven up your day.”

“I hope so,” Howard said. “I could use it.”

“Give him a howdy from me, then, will you? Tell him Cal says hello. He used to come in here pretty regular when he was working the ghost angle up to the museum. He had a lot of idle time. It wasn’t but a half mile up the road. Building’s still there, sitting empty. Ever been up there?”

“Never was,” Howard said. “Always wanted to, but I put it off. Then he went under and it was too late.”

“Too damned bad, too. He’s a character, Roy Barton is. He
seen
some things out in the woods …” The man laughed, shaking his head, remembering something out of the past, some sort of Roy Barton high jinks. “Hell, I believe him, too. I’ll be damned if I don’t.” He turned around to a glass-fronted drink cooler, opened it up, and pulled out a six-pack of Coors. “Take this along for him, will you? Tell him Cal Dalton says hello and why don’t he stop in.” He handed Howard his credit card along with the beer, and Howard signed for the gas and decals. Cal shook his hand. “Look for it on the right, three or four bends up. You can pass it easy if you aren’t looking out.”

Howard thanked him and left. Fog had settled into the campground below, making it look inhospitable and cold. Somehow the man’s carrying on like that had lifted Howard’s spirits, making him feel less like an outsider. The idea of having a look at the abandoned spirit museum appealed to him. There was a couple of hours of daylight left.

He had heard all about the museum from his mother, who had done her best to make the whole cockeyed thing sound reasonable. His mother was fiercely loyal to Uncle Roy, who had looked after them, in his way, in the years following Howard’s father’s death. Howard had picked up bits and pieces of family gossip lately about the museum’s sad decline and about how Uncle Roy had borrowed himself into lifelong debt to make a go of it. The rotten thing about it was that his poor uncle had believed in it, in the ghosts. Despite the gimmicky bumper stickers and decals, he had been convinced that he had seen a carload of spirits appearing out of the north coast dawn and
gunning away up the highway, dressed in out-of-date clothes and driving a Studebaker.

Why a Studebaker? That’s what had torn it, had wrecked the museum, just as surely as if the Studebaker had driven through the wall. It was a car that lacked credibility. The ghosts might as well have been pedaling unicycles and wearing fright wigs. If only it had been some sort of generic Ford or Chevy, people might have bought the idea.

For Uncle Roy, though, the ghost museum had been a scientific study in the paranormal. He didn’t care what sort of car the ghosts drove. He didn’t require a ghost to follow fashion. The public ridiculed a Studebaker, largely because it had a front end that you couldn’t tell from the rear; it was a sort of mechanical push-me pull-you. But if such a vehicle was good enough for the ghosts, then to hell with the public; it was good enough for Uncle Roy, too. That’s what made it about ten times as sad when the museum closed down—Uncle Roy’s sincerity.

Realizing that he wasn’t very hungry, Howard opened the glove compartment in order to put the brownie away. A glass paperweight lay inside, dense with flower canes and ribbons that looked like Christmas candy. He meant it to be a gift for Sylvia, who had always loved pretty things. It had cost him a couple hundred dollars, though, and it might seem like an ostentatious gift. He would have to be subtle with it.

A half mile north of Albion there was a turnout on the land side of the highway. Howard slowed the truck and bumped off onto the shoulder, which widened out behind a line of trees into a gravel parking lot that had been invisible from the road to the south. Sitting at the far edge of the lot, overhung by fir and eucalyptus, was a long bunkhouselike building, empty and boarded up. There was a fence of split pickets running along in front, with three or four cow skulls impaled on random pickets. A painted, weathered sign over the front porch read, “Museum of Modern Mysteries.”

He cut the engine and sat on the edge of the lot, just able to hear the muted crash of breakers through the rolled-up windows. So this was it. He had known it was out here somewhere, sitting lonesome and empty along the highway. Somehow he had expected more, although exactly what he had expected he couldn’t say. He was tempted at first to climb out and have a look, but the windows were shuttered, and the longer he sat there, the sadder the place seemed to be. Some other time, maybe. He was planning on spending a couple of weeks; he
could always get Uncle Roy to drive him back out and show him around, if his uncle was up to it and still had a key.

Howard thought about the Hoku-sai sketch, hanging on the wall of Graham’s house, back down the road. It was time to have a look at it. To hell with laundromats and appointments. He had waited long enough. It was almost two years ago that he had written a letter suggesting that Graham give the sketch to the museum in Santa Ana on what was called permanent loan. Graham could write it off on his taxes. Howard would use it as the focus of a new wing of oriental artwork.