Anastasia didn’t move from the doorway. She merely watched as he moved smoothly across the room to the coin case, inserted the key in the lock, turned it, opened the glass top and removed something. He closed the case, relocked it, returned the key to the toby jug, and came to her, there in the doorway.
“Everybody grows up sometime,” he said. “I’m going to have to sell this collection some day, probably some day soon. My Healey’s about ready for Medicare. So what I’d like you to do for me—”
He hesitated, beat beat beat, then offered his hand to her, opening the fist. The penny lay there against his palm, and she stopped breathing.
He was humble about it. Truly humble. “I remember Dad coming home with this one. He was like a kid with a new toy. A guest on shipboard had given it to him in exchange for some well-made pêche flambée. Turned out to be rare.”
“I can’t!” she said absolutely.
He went on swiftly. “Oh, it’s not as expensive as—say, a 1909 ‘S’ mint Indian Head, or some of the English pennies—but it’s pretty rare. Something about they pulled it off the counters soon after it was minted. I want you to have it. Please.”
“I can’t!”
“Please.” He put the penny in her hand. She held it as though it was stuck together of dust and spiderwebs, just looking at it down there, blazing and glowing in her palm. “It was my Dad’s, then it was mine, and now it’s yours. You can’t refuse a gift someone gives you like that.”
“But why? Why me?”
“Because,” he shrugged as a little boy might shrug, “you’re nice people. Make it into a pin or something.”
He closed her fingers around it. “Now, good night. I’ll be talking to you.”
He walked away from her and switched on the television set. It was a test pattern. He sat down and watched it for a moment, and then he heard the door close. When he turned at the sound, he was all awareness at that instant, she was still in the room, leaning against the door, fist closed over the wonder that lay therein, watching him.
Arlo woke just after one o’clock the next day. The scent of her perfume still occupied the other side of the bed. He stretched, kicked the sheet off his naked legs, and said to the familiar ceiling, “My, that was nice.”
He showered and put the coffee on.
Then, as he finished dressing, he opened the little drawer beneath his cufflink box—the drawer you might not realize was there unless you were specifically looking for a little drawer right there in that particular cufflink box—and in anticipation of the coming evening, removed one of the three remaining old pennies (the last of fourteen he had bought in the batch) and carried it into the living room. As he unlocked the coin case, he made a mental note to stop down at the coin shop and pick up another batch of old pennies. He was running low.
He relocked the case, and was returning the key to the toby jug, when the phone rang.
He picked it up and said, “Hi,” and got venom poured right into his ear.
“You bastard! You lying, low, thieving, seducing sonofabitch! You miserable con artist! You plague-bearer, you Typhoid Mary; you Communist fag ratfink bastard!”
“Hi.”
“You low scum dog, you. You crud. Of all the low, rotten, ugly, really outright evil demeaning stinky things a creep fascist right-wing louse could pull, that was the most vile, nauseating, despicable, hideous—”
“Hi, Anastasia. What’s new?”
“What’s new, you shit? I’ll tell you what’s new! Among other things, that coin of your dear old Daddy’s is new. New enough to be worth exactly one lousy cent. Not a rare! Not a valuable! Not a nothing, that’s what’s new!”
Horror coursed through Arlo’s strangled words. “Wh—what?” He coughed, choked, swallowed hard. “What’re you talking about? Whaddaya mean? Tell me… tell me, dammit!”
Her voice was less steamy. There was an edge of doubt now. “I took it down today, there’s a numismatist in the office building where I work —”
Affront lived in his shock. “You what?!? You had my father’s penny appraised? You did that? What kind of a person—”
“Listen, don’t try to make me the heavy, Arlo! It wasn’t valuable at all. It was just a miserable old penny like a million others, and you got me into bed with it, that’s what! You lied to me!”
Softly, he crept in between her rebuilding attack. “I don’t believe it.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“No.”
“Yes, yes, and yes! Worth a penny. Period.”
“Oh my God,” he husked. “Dad never knew. He always thought… how cruel… how awfully cruel… that man who gave it to him on shipboard… I can’t believe it… oh Jeezus…”
There was silence at the other end.
“Oh, God…” he murmured. Then, after a while, gently, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know… listen, I don’t think I want to talk any more… excuse me…”
She stopped him. “Arlo?”
Silence.
“Arlo?” Very gently from her.
Silence again, then, almost a whisper: “Yeah… ?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Forget it.”
“No, really. It was a rotten thing for me to do. I’d—I’d like to—”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“No, really, I mean it. I’d like to… are you busy tonight… could I come over and maybe—”
Arlo held the phone with one hand, unlocked the case with the other. As he removed the penny, making a mental note to perhaps put off that trip to the coin shop for a week or so, he said with absolute sincerity into the mouthpiece, “I guess so. Yeah, okay. Why don’t you stop off at a deli and pick up some corned beef and pickles and we can…”
The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge
This trip is mapped through a dark passage in my recent past. It deals with a mortal dread we all share: the madness that betides us when we have been fucked over once too often by the petty thugs and conscienceless pillagers who infest the world—from venal politicians who manipulate our lives for personal gain, down to the building contractors who promise decent craftsmanship and leave you with leaking roofs. At some point you go blind with rage. Why me? you wail! I don’t cheat people, I do my job honestly and with care… how can creeps like this be permitted to flourish?
Well, I offer you the words of the Polish poet Edward Yashinsky, who said, “Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.”
When I was a kid there was a popular novel titled Leave Her to Heaven. Though the book has long since passed out of my memory, the title has stuck. I don’t believe there is such a thing as “divine retribution.” The universe is neither malign nor benign. It’s just there, and it’s too busy keeping itself together to balance the scales when some feep has jerked you around. I am a strong adherent of the philosophy that one must seek retribution oneself.
And if the courts of the land cannot deliver up these people to justice then don’t form a lynch party, because that forces you to become what you have beheld, as vile as those who did you dirt. Instead, unleash primal forces against them. Force entry and take a trip through their lives in ways they will find most troublesome.
Write a story and let the power of the massmind git’m!
William Weisel pronounced his name why-zell. but many of the unfortunates for whom he had done remodeling and construction pronounced it weasel.
He had designed and built a new guest bathroom for Fred Tolliver, a man in his early sixties who had retired from the active life of a studio musician with the foolish belief that his fifteen-thousand-dollar-per-year annuity would sustain him in comfort. Weisel had snubbed the original specs on the job, had substituted inferior materials for those required by the codes, had used cheap Japanese pipe instead of galvanized or stressed plastic, had eschewed lath and plaster for wallboard that left lumpy seams, had skirted union wages by ferrying in green card workers from Tijuana every morning by dawn light, had—in short—done a spectacularly crummy job on Fred Tolliver’s guest bathroom. That was the first mistake.