The Paper Grail (3 page)

Two years ago that had sounded enterprising—something new. But for nearly a year after he sent the letter he hadn’t heard anything in return, and had almost forgotten about the sketch. Then, unexpectedly, he had got a letter back, agreeing to the permanent loan business. Graham wouldn’t ship the piece, though; Howard would have to come after it. He had done nothing about it for most of a year. Then a month ago something shifted in him—the dreams, the accidental rediscovery of the origami lily—and he began to feel like a man whose spirit was beginning to recover from a long dry spell.

He came up with the idea of going up north, of taking a slow, zigzag route, driving back roads out of obscure beaches and primitive campgrounds. It would be nothing less than a matter of sorting out his life. He would visit Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith in Fort Bragg, get to know Sylvia again. He would take a month to do it, just like in the old days. Mrs. Gleason, his boss, hadn’t liked the idea of month-long vacations, but Howard showed her Graham’s letter, and that had done the trick. He had kept his thumb over the date.

Fog settled around the pickup truck as he sat on the roadside now, and water dripped onto the roof of the cab from an overhanging tree limb. The sea wind gusted around the doors, and Howard started the truck in order to fire up the heater. Once the engine was idling, his sitting there seemed pointless, so he rolled up to the edge of the asphalt and peered downhill into the gloom. A pair of headlights swung around the curve of highway below, the car itself still invisible in the fog. It was impossible to tell how far away it was, so Howard waited it out, letting it have the highway to itself.

Howard recognized the characteristic cheese-grater roar of a Volkswagen engine before the microbus actually materialized out of the wall of fog. It was moving slowly, even for a Volkswagen, like a deep-water fish prowling through submarine canyons. One
moment it was a ghost, obscured by mist; the next it was solid. Howard thought suddenly about his uncle’s Studebaker, full of top-hatted spirits, and on impulse he shifted the transmission into reverse, as if he would escape it by hurtling backward into the forest.

As it drew near, it appeared at first to be covered with sticks and leaves, like something that had driven up out of the deep woods. But it wasn’t leaves; it was stuff from the ocean that had been glued onto the body of the bus in layers, so that only the front windows were clear. Dried kelp and sea fans, starfish and barnacles, clumped mussels and fish skeletons and seashells covered the bus in layers so that it looked like a tide pool on wheels. It was impossible to be sure it was a car any longer, except that it ran on tires and had a windshield. Even the rumbling engine might have been a cobbled-together mechanism of tube worms and starfish gears and pumping seawater. It growled uphill, lit within by the strange green glow of the instrument panel. The driver’s face was a shadow.

Howard shifted back out of reverse, realizing that his mouth was open in disbelief. He watched the bus disappear into the fog around the curve of the hillside, noticing that a big patch of stuff had evidently fallen off the outside of the engine compartment—too much heat, probably. The effect was suddenly one of shabbiness, something like a ghost story ruined by missing paragraphs.

Still, something about the bus, about seeing it, reminded him of his uncle’s museum and of Michael Graham’s stone house, with its passages and turrets. The very atmosphere of the north coast was compulsive—the overgrown countryside and the perpetual mist, the strange appeal of a wire rack full of gaudy decals. It struck him that there was something right and natural about the deep-sea bus, as if it stood to reason. He laughed uneasily, reminding himself that eccentrics were common on the coast. They must issue cards, like a Mensa ID. After another week of solitude and fog he would be ready to apply for one himself.

No wonder Uncle Roy had been possessed with notions of ghosts. The foggy air seemed to be thick with them. For the first time since he’d left home a week ago he wanted company—even old Graham’s company. He rolled out onto the highway, heading south again. He would make it to the stone house with an hour’s worth of daylight to spare.

2

T
HE
limousine crept along through the San Francisco traffic, down Grant Street, through Chinatown toward North Beach. It was July, and the streets were full of tourists, the heavy stream of cars barely moving in either direction and people cutting warily back and forth between bumpers. Why the fool of a driver had missed his offramp and tied them up in crosstown traffic, Heloise Lamey couldn’t fathom. Stupidity, maybe. Some sort of smart-aleck malice—wasting the time of a poor old woman out alone, at the mercy of the world.

She said nothing, though. It was already spilled milk. She could rant and rave and it wouldn’t get them to their destination one moment sooner. And the hired driver wouldn’t care anyway. She could buy the limousine service and have the man fired and he wouldn’t care. Her insisting on justice would simply provoke abuse. Despite his snappy uniform, he was sullen and dull and false-looking. She could see it in his eyes. She could take the measure of a man in an instant. In her sixty-eight years on earth she had learned to do that with a facility that she was proud of. It was the key to her success as a businesswoman.

People weren’t what they used to be. The tradespeople didn’t keep to their stations. Duty was a thing of the past. Everywhere she went people were full of abuse. There was trouble of some sort from almost everyone she ran into. She seemed to remember a time in the distant past when that wasn’t so, when people and life were simple and direct. When that had changed, she couldn’t at all say.

Before the war she had almost married a sailor. She remembered how handsome he had looked in his uniform on the day he shipped out. On the night before, they had danced to Benny Goodman. Now his bones were on the bottom of the ocean somewhere, and that’s what life had to offer you ultimately—death and disappointment. The world hadn’t changed in that respect. People had, though. Now there was nothing but grasping, people
clawing their way through life at your expense. A person had no choice but to get in ahead of them. There was no middle ground. She stayed home as much as she could, but even there she was forced to carry on a war with a lot of backwoods hicks who didn’t know progress when they saw it, or destiny, either.

Her mouth set and her eyes narrowed, she sat in the center of the backseat and stared straight ahead out the front window, trying not to see the awful gaggle of people swarming on the sidewalks and in the gutters. She believed that there was a certain dignity in her face, which was long and thin and with a prominent chin and the eyes of a monarch—the sort who saw straight through her subjects and their pitiful little games. There was nothing weak in her face, nothing watery. It was the sort of face that wasn’t easily forgotten. She peered at herself in the window reflection now, refastening a strand of hair that had come loose.

Her attention was broken by the high-pitched shouting of an old Chinese news vendor, arguing, probably, over a nickel. At the curb the rear door of a van swung open and a man stepped out carrying a flayed goat over one bloody shoulder and a string of plucked ducks over the other. Life, like so much scurrying vermin, went on around her. She thought for the sixth time how necessary it had been to hire a limousine. Then she realized they were stopped again, and she checked her watch. “I’m
very
late,” she said to the driver, who said nothing in return.

The traffic cleared just then, as if it, at least, were paying attention to her. The car moved forward slowly, making nearly a half a block’s worth of headway before stopping again. The lights of a tow truck whirled in front of them now, blocking oncoming traffic while the tow truck driver walked around an illegally parked Mercedes-Benz, looking in the windows. He pulled a clutch of flat plastic slats out of his coat and slipped one in along the edge of the front door of the parked car in order to jimmy it open, a policeman directing the cars around it, holding the limousine at bay with an upturned hand.

Skeptically Mrs. Lamey watched them work. Nothing was safe from them. Even the police would steal your car. “Honk the horn,” Mrs. Lamey said to the driver.

“At the cop?” He turned and looked at her.

“Just
honk the horn,
young man. I’ve been patient with you up until now, but this takes it too far. Honk the horn.”

The driver squinted into her face. “You gotta be kidding,” he said.

“I never
kid
, if I take your meaning. I assure you I’m very serious. Honk your horn. I’ve hired this car, and I demand it.”

“Why don’t you climb up here and honk it yourself, lady? Then
you
can talk to the cop.” He turned forward again, ignoring her. Opening the glove box, he found a pack of gum, pulling out two sticks and shoving them into his mouth, settling into his seat contentedly to wait out the tow truck, even if it took all afternoon.

Mrs. Lamey leaned forward, unable to believe it. She had expected grief of some nature, but this sort of outright impudence from a driver … “I
insist.
Honk the horn or I’ll have your job.”

“You can have the fuckin’ job, lady, and the horn, too. Calm the hell down. Where you going, anyway? Just up to North Beach. It’s easier to
walk
from here. If I was you, that’s what I’d do. I’d get out and walk. You’d have been there twenty minutes ago.”

“Your advice is worthless to me, young man. Here, look, they’ve gotten out of the way. Pull around these cars, for heaven’s sake.” She waved a limp-wristed hand toward the street.

He shrugged and edged the limousine past the tow truck, which had straightened out now and was towing the Mercedes out into traffic. They stopped and started a half dozen times down the last two blocks to Portsmouth Square, slowing in the press of cars swinging up onto Broadway and Columbus. Small gangs of youths lounged on the sidewalk along the square, shouting and smoking cigarettes.

Mrs. Lamey carefully kept her eyes straight ahead. There was nothing here that she wanted to see. She felt vulnerable, even inside the limousine, but with a little bit of work she could ignore the world outside utterly. As they turned up Columbus, though, she saw three young men with weirdly miscut hair bend toward the limousine and make obscene gestures with both hands, all three of them laughing and hooting. Mrs. Lamey concentrated hard on the windshield, on the car ahead of them, on the tip of her nose, blocking out their existence, eradicating the whole brief scene.

“That’s rich, ain’t it?” the driver said, chuckling in the front seat. “What it is, is the limo. Happens all the time. Can’t go nowhere without people flipping you off. You know what I mean? It’s a social statement is what I think.” He shook his head, clearly pleased, able to take the long view. “You got to admire it, though.” He looked at her wide-eyed in the rearview
mirror, as if inviting her to admire it as much as he did, to talk a little bit of philosophy.

Mrs. Lamey was silent. There was nothing on earth she had to admire. Where she came from limousine drivers spoke when spoken to. They weren’t street-corner sociologists. He shook his head after a half minute of her refusing to speak, and they drove in silence up Columbus to Vallejo.

She directed him up an alley between graffiti-scrawled brick façades. Midway down, the alley opened onto a courtyard. “Stop here,” she said suddenly.

“Here?” He turned and looked at her incredulously, having expected, perhaps, some more reasonable destination.

“That’s right. Here. In the alley. I won’t be needing your services any longer. I’m getting out here.
Can
you fathom that?”

He shrugged. “Suits me.” He got out and went round to her door, opening it and gesturing gallantly at the littered asphalt.

“I won’t be giving you a tip of any sort,” she said to him, staring at his chin with a look of determination. “I don’t know what you’re accustomed to, but I’ll tell you right now that I had thought at first to give you two dollars. You can ruminate on that for the rest of the afternoon. I’m moderately certain that I would have gotten quicker, more courteous service from a taxicab. One expects a certain amount of gracious behavior from a driver, a certain level of professionalism and expertise.”

She took two steps to distance herself from him, then turned around to face him squarely. With an air of someone having the last word, she showed him the two crisp one-dollar bills that might have been his. She tucked them away finally and irretrievably into her pocket, turning away into the courtyard without a backward glance.

She hadn’t gone three steps, though, when a horn honked. Without thinking she looked back at the alley, where the limousine accelerated slowly past the mouth of the courtyard. The driver was bent across the front seat, waving out the open passenger window. He shouted a parting obscenity which somehow involved eating. Mrs. Lamey closed her ears to it just a second too late, continuing across the courtyard and resolutely listening to nothing now but the
tap, tap, tap
of her shoes on concrete, blocking out the whole filthy world round about her.