Zeke’s mouth opened a few times with a dry clicking sound while he worked out the ramifications of this. Which in his case took a certain amount of time. No hurrying him up. When he got like this, it was like trying to get through to someone in the afterworld, you felt like you had to link hands and bum incense or something to encourage the dope. Finally a tiny inner switch must have toggled because Zeke put down his drink and stood up.
“Bro,” he said heavily, “if Ma ain’t stringin’ us a line, we just gotta take a chance an’ go back there, bro. You wait in the car, that’s all you gotta do, an’ I’ll deke in back in that place through a window for half a sec, an’...”
“But naturally it isn’t there now,” Ma said.
This last bit of intelligence hit Zeke hard. Ma tagging this statement on the end of it all got him up on the tips of his toes with his grizzled jaw clenched and his eyes on fire.
“What’re you talkin’ about, Ma?”
“If you’d shut up for ten seconds maybe you’d find out, wouldn’t you? Are you ready to listen? Fine. I seen the bag there — only of course I didn’t know what it was you were lookin’ for exactly ’cause you wouldn’t tell me nothing, remember? Keepin’ it to yourself, some big hairy secret. One corner of a canvas bag stickin’ outa the couch. So... I took it.”
Zeke looked like the victim of a stun grenade. Dense as he was, even he could tell where this was leading. Not getting ready to holler any more. Only dazed. Almost whispering this time.
“You took the night deposit bag, Ma?”
“That’s right.”
“You took the night deposit out of the room, an’ you...”
“Whatever it was,” Ma said, “some bag, I took it. But I couldn’t open it. Like George says, it was locked. So what I did, I put it in the sack with the rest of the stuff that I’d collected. In that slipcover bag.”
Zeke stood there for a few more seconds, then slowly crumbled. All the fight went out of him. His hopes, his expectations, all of those positive emotions seemed to sink down into him while a heavy glaze spread slowly over his eyes, this guy remembering the way he’d refused to tell Ma what he was looking for, remembering the crash of the barbecue hitting the lane, remembering how he had behaved toward her, finally losing it and tearing the bulging slipcover out of Ma’s hands and whacking it into the chute.
Ma said, “See, nobody would tell me anything. It’s really dumb. When you stop an’ think about it, it was me found the bag you were lookin’ for. An’ it was me saved you from the little fat jahoobie, too.”
Finally Zeke managed to whisper something. Directing his comment at George.
“I’m holdin’ you personally responsible for this.”
“Yeah,” George said, “I thought you might.”
“Personally responsible. I told you from day one. I told you from the word go. I warned you this would happen.”
“At least,” Ma said, “you can’t be mad at me.” Smug, and satisfied, and pleased with herself. “Next time,” she said, “maybe you should have some faith. I’m your ma, after all. You weasels.”
The Notes of Morrow’s Horn
by Stephen Wasylyk
Legends, it is said, are merely topics of conversation that fall somewhere between folklore and witches’ tales. You believe them or you don’t, so feel free to decide about this one. The mystery that goes with it is real, however, and can be attested to by the people present when it came to light.
Thirty-odd years ago, I was living in a too-small apartment with my wife Judy and three-year-old son Matthew. A month away from my law degree, I was looking forward to finally earning a salary instead of scraping by on a small inheritance and a few dollars from Judy’s part-time job. The only question was where.
The answer came one spring evening. The small, thin man at the door had bushy, iron-gray hair, prominent ears, and a nose too large for his thin face. The dark pinstriped suit screamed attorney, backed by hard eyes you wouldn’t want to look into from a witness stand. His smile, however, made you forget all that.
His name was Gerald Tobias, he said, and he’d been given my name by one of my professors as someone who might be interested in what he had to offer.
Interested? If I’d had a red velvet runner, I’d have unrolled it before him. Fifteen minutes later, after reassuring an apologetic Judy he understood the disorder of the apartment, he was settled in our one worn easy chair, a sleeper-clad Matthew in his lap.
He was from a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, where he’d built a substantial practice. He was a widower, had lost a son in Korea. Another son was in Denver. He’d reached the point where, as he put it, he’d rather do more fishing than lawyering, but didn’t simply want to close the doors and walk away when the right man could take over in a year or so. Far better than struggling in my own office until I was established. But perhaps not better than joining a major law firm in Philadelphia or New York where I could earn big money eventually, which, according to the professor who’d given him my name, I was capable of doing.
Personally, he’d always felt there was no point to accumulating more money than he’d need to live comfortably, do what he wanted to do, and buy what he wanted to buy. Billionaire, pauper, or somewhere in between, we all ended in the same place, our accomplishments indicated only by the size of our tombstone. Since none of us ended in a position to admire it, what was the point? Some things were far more important than money.
If I wasn’t interested, he’d understand. If I was — he’d looked at Judy and smiled — if we were, he suggested we spend a weekend with him. He had a large house and a housekeeper-cook who came in during the day. We could look the town over and go through the house we’d live in. Since he owned it, there would be no rent, but we’d be responsible for maintenance and taxes. He stroked Matthew’s hair and casually mentioned that it had a rather large back yard for a boy to play in.
A real house? With a back yard? Judy’s eyes lit up. The town would absolutely have to be the tail end of the universe to lose her vote. She’d had enough of struggling up and down apartment house steps with a stroller and a toddler, and if we settled in a city, she’d have several more years of it before we could afford to buy.
Gerald Tobias was a great lawyer. He had no talent at all for description.
The town was a jewel, nestled in a fold of the mountains with a river running through the center. The tallest building in the business district was only ten stories, the courthouse massive granite, almost all the houses single family; the whole thing sparkling below you when the road crested the mountain and curved downward. The only jarring note was to the northeast where a small steel mill producing highly specialized products belched smoke.
Our house was a surprise: a low stone rancher as far removed from the Tobiases’ gingerbread Victorian wood frame as several generations can get. His “rather large back yard” turned out to be more than a half acre.
The inhabitants were a typically diverse mixture of ethnic groups, religions, social classes, and color — with the usual quota of successes and failures, honest people and criminals, adulterers, alcoholics, and religious and ethnic bigots, all with the usual range of sexual preferences.
After we’d settled in, I learned that everyone called Gerald Tobias, “Mr.,” and when he spoke, everyone listened. A judgeship at any level had always been his for the asking, and terming his practice “substantial” was a considerable understatement. He was counsel for the steel mill, almost every large business in town, and most of the prominent families. Remarkably, he’d taken on no partners nor added staff until I came along. He employed only two middle-aged women, one as receptionist, the other as legal secretary, who knew more law than I did. I blinked when I saw that their salaries were higher than anything a good many of my classmates expected to earn for several years until I realized, why not? They were the reason he didn’t need any assistants.