The Paper Grail (12 page)

“What came of it?” asked Uncle Roy. “Did she react to the props?”

“Infuriated her.”

“Good, good. So much the better. Will she hold off until the end of the month?”

“Yes, but I had to threaten her,” Howard said. “I guess the lawyer scam worked on her.” Howard didn’t like to lie to his uncle, except that Uncle Roy would feel good about the ruse, and that was worth something and would explain why the old woman had gone off without any money. “These landlord types want the check,” Howard said. “They don’t want to foreclose. They can’t afford it. They’re in the business of being paid, not of renovating houses. I guaranteed her the money come November. It was as simple as that.”

“And we’ll get it, too. This haunted house business can’t fail. You’ve seen what I’ve got going here—the corpses, the ghost woman, the bats.”

Howard nodded. “The eyeballs,” he said, finishing the list. He realized that his hands were shaking. The meeting outside had worked him over pretty thoroughly. Now he had involved himself in a lie, and in the end it would probably be impossible to hide it from Uncle Roy, who, regardless of what sort of deadbeat he was, wouldn’t put up with Howard paying his bills for him. Sylvia hadn’t made that part up.

“Who is this woman?” Howard asked.

“One Heloise Lamey. She owns half the coast. Part of a consortium of some sort. This man Stoat is part of it. They’re an octopus—a finger in every damned sort of pie.”

“So she’s Sylvia’s landlady, too, down at the shop?”

“One and the same. Stoat wasn’t a bad sort, years ago. Money is the root, though. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. Money is the stinking root.”

“What’s their problem?”

“They’re millionaires, aren’t they? Rough crowd, millionaires. All this talk of redevelopment … There’s oil in it for them, too—offshore. They’d pave the ocean if there was money in it. Take your man Stoat. He’s drunk my beer, dated my daughter. He was always a little slick, of course. But I don’t hold that against a man. That’s all appearances, and we know what those are worth. But then he fell in with the old woman and made a couple of bucks. That frosted it. He turned into a damned chameleon, changed the color of his scales. Started to live for his bank account.”

Howard found the anti-Stoat talk very pleasant, and he wished that he knew more about the man so as to be able to run him down even more expansively. His mouth was dry, though—probably a nervous reaction from his bout with the landlady. “I’m going to grab a glass of water,” he said, leaving his uncle in the living room. Aunt Edith had gone back upstairs. He circled around into the kitchen, working things over in his mind. He had been there about an hour and a half and already the complications were descending on him. He might have expected it. Nobody told him it would be easy. There were never any guarantees. He drank a glass of water at the sink, staring out the window at the woods, lost in puzzled thought. The sound of a voice made him jump.

“That’s not a friendly place, those woods.” It was Uncle Roy, who had slipped into the kitchen. He nodded at the window, at the forest beyond. His face was serious, almost fearful. “There’s bears in them. Can you believe that? Mountain lions, too. Those woods are stalked by carnivores.”

“Really?” Howard said. “Right out there?”

“Can’t tell by looking, can you? Trees are too dense. The creatures might be watching us right this moment, hiding in the shadows. They don’t take well to civilization. It ruins them. They develop a taste for garbage over the years. They’ll tear a man’s head clean off, too, and eat his entrails.”

“Not often, I hope.”

“Doesn’t have to happen to a man more than once, does it?” Uncle Roy smiled at him, having deliberately misunderstood. “Nope, those are inhospitable trees—nothing but poison oak in there. The poison vapors get into the lungs, finally. Throat closes up tight. Death by constriction, the medical men call it.” He shook his head darkly, not relishing the idea of a man’s throat closing up. “Cultists, too. All varieties of them, but not half as bad as the dope farmers.”

“I hear they’re a dangerous crowd,” Howard said. “I can understand it, I guess, price of dope and all. Must be profitable.”

“Oh, there’s money in it. Yes indeed. Money’s paramount in a backwater like this. Guns, dogs, trip cords, Claymore mines, razor wire, spike pits, bear traps—you name it; the dope farmers have the lot of it, the whole megillah. I wouldn’t go into those woods on a bet.”

Howard shook his head, as if he wouldn’t either, for the moment anyway. Aunt Edith had gone into them quick enough, though, and carrying a sandwich, too.

“Then there’s the logging roads. They’ll run you right down, loggers will. They’d take a man like you for an environmentalist. Nothing they hate worse. They’ll shoot you on sight. The only crowd that won’t shoot you are the cultists. They want you alive.”

Uncle Roy seemed to have gone crazy, rattling off his catalogue of forest horrors. He peered into the refrigerator again, pushing things around, trying to find something that appealed to him. “Coke?” he asked.

“Thanks. Shall we ask Aunt Edith?”

“For permission? Or whether she wants one, too?” He looked angry all of a sudden, as if the question had set him off. “She’s retired, actually. Taking a nap. You won’t see her until it’s time to cook dinner.” His face softened a little then. “She’s worried about Sylvia, to tell you the truth. What she wants is more faith. Things iron themselves out. She’s got the usual motherly instincts, though, and they run her ragged. Survival is paramount in a business like Sylvia’s. If she survives the winter …” He shrugged and then grinned abruptly, as if having thought of something more cheerful. “Edith is ticked off about the rubber bat, actually. She wasn’t keen on my putting on the laugh record, either. She takes the old woman too seriously.”

Howard couldn’t think of anything to say about taking the old woman seriously that wouldn’t irritate his uncle, so he changed
the subject entirely, trying to force Uncle Roy to slip up and be a little bit candid for a change. “Tell me,” he said. “What are they, these gluers I keep hearing about? Mr. Jimmers mentioned them to me. They seem to have stolen a bunch of junk out of my glove compartment. Are they some kind of cult?”

“Nobody knows, really. Almost nobody. Live back in among the trees. Anarchists to the last man jack of them. Won’t wear matching socks to save their mortal souls. Won’t cut their hair. Spend their days gluing stuff up, layer on top of layer, usually on their cars. Coral reef syndrome; that’s what I call it. Kids all ride skateboards—break into churches and schools. Won’t work. Some people think it’s primitivism, the decline of man. They distill a hell of a bottle of whiskey, though, just between the two of us.”

“I can tell you that their wine isn’t worth anything at all. I tried some last night. I was forced to drink water instead.”

“That bad?” Uncle Roy grimaced, as if finding it hard to imagine. “They don’t drink the stuff themselves, that’s why. They don’t know a lick about wine, except that all these natural-sounding fruit wines are big with the tourists, especially the teetotalers. They bring home a bottle of herb wine and offer it to company as a joke. It’s like taking the cure. The gluer elders can drink whiskey, though. They smoke the malt over fires like the Scots do, only they don’t use peat; they use green redwood skived out of root balls with an adze.”

“Root balls?”

“That’s right. Got to be done that way. Hand me down a couple of those glasses.”

Howard reached into the cupboard over his head, pulling out two green tumblers. Behind them, sitting in the back corner of the cupboard, was a collection of salt and pepper shakers—ten or twelve pairs. Sitting among them, smug and leering, was a porcelain Humpty Dumpty. Howard was stricken speechless. Here, too, he thought.

“Do you know what the oldest living thing in the world is?” asked his uncle.

Howard shook his head, unable to guess.

“A root ball from a stand of redwoods. They’ve got redwood trees out there that are two thousand years old if they’re a day. Where do they come from? you might ask. Not from seeds, mostly—from root balls. One tree puts down roots and then one day another tree comes up from the roots of that first one. Then along comes another, and all of these new ones putting down
new roots. First tree grows old and dies, finally—falls over. Maybe it’s a thousand years old, maybe two. And this goes on for twenty thousand years through God’s own generations of trees, all of them growing and adding roots to this root ball.
It
doesn’t die, though. Fires don’t touch it. Bugs can’t get at it. How old is it? How big is it? You tell
me.
Nobody can guess. Bigger than the pyramids, older than the woolly mammoth.”

He squinted at the unopened Coca-Cola cans. “Anyway, that’s what they use to smoke the whiskey. Older the root material, the better the spirits. That’s paramount. You’re a literary man. Have you read Morris’ essay on age?”

It seemed to Howard as if he must have, but he couldn’t calculate it right now. The coincidence of the Humpty Dumpty still played in his mind. He reached into the cupboard again and pulled it out, waving it at his uncle. “What
is
this, anyway?” Howard asked. “I seem to be running into a lot of them lately.”

His uncle eyeballed him, as if he were trying to fathom the question, or, perhaps, as if he were considering how much he could safely say on the subject. “That’s Humpty Dumpty,” he said. “One of Edith’s dust collectors. Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Right. It’s just that they seem to
mean
something, don’t they? Maybe it’s the look on his face. He’s such a know-it-all.”

“Mean something? I’m not sure … They’ve got a fascinating history, I suppose. They’re an incredibly ancient business involving fertility and reproduction. Sort of a metaphoric root ball, aren’t they? Nobody knows how long they’ve been around. That lad is one of your vegetation kings; that’s my notion. Early incarnation of the thing. Your friends the gluers are fond of him. They revere a fat man. Consider themselves to be the king’s men, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Howard said, putting the little porcelain egg back into the cupboard. “Who’s the king, then?”

Uncle Roy hesitated for a moment before speaking. “Maybe you’re putting too fine a point on it,” he said. “Safer to think of it as a myth. It’s easy in this climate to get swept up in the wind and rain and forest, to start thinking in terms of weather. Things up here can be supernaturally green, and would be, except for the drought. People drift north talking about ‘getting back to the land.’ But they don’t know what that means. Not really. That’s what I was telling you a moment ago—that business about the
woods. They’re a dangerous place. Do you follow me?”

Howard shook his head. He didn’t follow anything except that his half-innocent question about the Humpty Dumpty had sailed the conversation straight into the realm of the mystical. What was wrong with people up here? Everyone was a puzzle waiting to be solved. First Mr. Jimmers and then the landlady. Now Uncle Roy. And what the hell
was
Aunt Edith doing out in the woods with a sandwich on a plate?

“Look here,” Uncle Roy said, suddenly animated. “It’s nearly four o’clock. Forget the Cokes. Let’s make a little run down to Sammy’s. I usually drop in about this time. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill before dinner. We can work out the elements of the barn lumber scheme.”

What scheme? Howard wondered, following his uncle out the door. Now suddenly there was a scheme, although nobody on earth could lay out the particulars of it. In his mind, Uncle Roy was probably certain that Howard had given serious thought to the barn lumber angle. He hoped the haunted house plans were less imaginary.

“We’ll take your truck,” Uncle Roy said, climbing heavily into the passenger side and looking down furtively into his jacket pocket.

Howard went around opposite and fired up the engine, driving down Oak Street toward the highway, swinging south finally, and then back up Cypress. “Across the street there,” Uncle Roy said. “By the warehouse.”

The tavern was long and almost windowless, sided in dark redwood with the name “Sammy’s” painted on it. Its roof was a shambles of different-colored composition shingles in layers—strips and pieces having broken or blown off over the years. A neon cocktail glass stood atop a rusted steel post outside, lit dimly despite it being daylight. Only a couple of cars were parked in the gravel lot when they pulled in, including what might have been an old Chevy from around 1965. Only you couldn’t quite tell now, because it was utterly covered in layers of cheap religious icons—Day of the Dead skulls and bleeding Christs and robed Virgin Marys made out of painted plastic and plaster of Paris.

“Gluers,” Uncle Roy whispered.

7

“T
ROUBLE?”
Howard asked, and almost at once he felt a little foolish, a little childish. He realized then that he was full of a vague, bulk-rate uneasiness. There was a shadow lying across the landscape, and he suspected that it had some sort of fearful shape and that he was on the verge of making it out. Here was another piece of that shadow, he had thought, seeing the car parked beneath the neon sign.