In For a Penny Read Free Page B

o’clock he shouted “Jimmy Carter!” but it was the Fireman’s Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.
    “I guess it’s not working as good as it was,” Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.
    . . .
    On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod’s Liquors and bought five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina’s birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.
    On the way home, he stopped at the used bookstore where he found something promising: a book called
A Field Guide to the Paranormal.
He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.
    “You’re interested in the paranormal?” Bob asked him, taking his money.
    “Yeah,” Art confessed. “I find it kind of fascinating.”
    “My sister’s a psychic. She has a sort of organization.”
    “Really? What do you think about it,” Art asked. “Just out of curiosity.” He realized that he wanted very badly to tell someone about his experiences, and it dawned on him that he was more than a little bit proud of himself. He wasn’t the same man today that he had been last week.
    “I’ve got no problem with it. There’s a guy at Krystal’s meetings that bends spoons. That and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve seen it. How about you?”
    “Yeah, I’m a believer. A couple of things happened to me recently …” He realized that he couldn’t think of any way to relate the possum story or the phone calls in such a way as to give them the punch they deserved, and he wished that something more grand had happened to him, like predicting an earthquake or a train wreck. “What kind of things?”
    “Oh, you know, knowing in advance who’s calling on the phone, that kind of thing. And I nailed a
Jeopardy!
answer before the question was asked.”
    “You mean you got the question before the answer.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I meant. It was Oliver Cromwell.”
    “Cromwell? The host? I thought it was that other guy.”
    “It
is
that other guy. I meant the answer was Oliver Cromwell.”
    “I got Oliver Hardy once,” Bob told him, counting out change. “The category was silent films, I think. Or maybe it was comedians. Either way.” The transaction, just like the conversation, had run its course.
    “Sure,” Art said. “I guess so. Look, what’s this thing with your sister? She has meetings or something?”
    “Thursday nights, at her house. It’s a kind of support group, you know?”
    “Psychics need a support group?”
    “Hell,
everyone
needs a support group these days.”
    “And her name’s really Crystal?”
    “With a
K,”
Bob said. He wrote his sister’s name and number on the back of the sales receipt and handed it to Art, who slipped it into his wallet. When he got home he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the living room and thumbed through the book, but it turned out to be volume one of a set, mostly concerned with spontaneous human combustion and the aura phenomenon, neither of which, apparently, applied to his own situation.
    He had the house to himself, and he decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet to meditate in order to foster psychic suggestion. As he sat there with his eyes shut, his thoughts spun idly, and he began to develop the notion that unwittingly he had managed to access a particular grotto inside his mind, a place where the subconscious depths lay like a