Dean Koontz - The City

“It must be really valuable,” I said.

“Well, sweetie, it’s not Tiffany. But it is pretty, isn’t it?”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“I don’t really know. He seemed to be a nice man.”

“I think he likes you,” I said.

“Actually, Jonah, I believe he gave it to me to give to you.”

With something like awe, I took the pendant from her when she held it out to me. “You really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

When I held the chain and allowed the dangling heart to turn back and forth, the polished Lucite looked almost liquid in the sunlight, as if the feather floated in a great drop of water that cohered magically to the eyehook. Or in a tear.

“What bird do you think it’s from?” I asked. “A pigeon?”

“Oh, I expect it’s from something more grand than a pigeon. Don’t you think it must be from some kind of songbird, one with a particularly sweet voice? I do. That’s what I think.”

“Then it must be,” I said. “But what’ll I do with it? It’s a heart, it’s like a girl’s jewelry.”

“And you can’t be seen wearing a girl’s jewelry—is that it?”

“I already get teased about being skinny.”

“You’re not skinny. You’re lean.” She elbowed me in the side. “You’re a lean, mean music machine.”

She always made me feel like more and better than I knew myself to be. I thought then that lifting a child’s spirits was something every mother did effortlessly. But as the years passed, I saw the world more clearly and knew how fortunate I was to have been brought to life by the grace of Sylvia Bledsoe.

There on the park bench, I said, “Mr. Gluck said it’ll bring good luck.”

“Never hurts to have some.”

“He didn’t say you could make a wish on it.”

“That’s easy luck, Jonah. Easy luck always turns bad. You want the kind of luck you have to earn.”

“Maybe it’ll be okay if I carry it in my pocket—you know, instead of wearing it.”

“I’m sure that’s fine. Or keep it in a nightstand drawer. The important thing is to keep it safe. When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.”

When, years later, I learned who had given it to the cabbie and what it meant, the pendant would indeed prove to be a treasure.

With the pendant in my pocket, it seemed that the cloud-free summer sky blazed bluer than ever. The day was warm, and this part of the city looked cleaner than the part that we’d come from. As noon approached, the trunk shadows shrank toward the trees, and the web of branch shadows spread equally in all directions as if spooled out by spiders. The sun spangled the big pond, and through the quivers of light, we watched scores of fat koi that swam there from spring through autumn before being moved to indoor aquariums. Mom bought a twenty-five-cent bag of bread cubes, and the fish ventured right up to us, fins wimpling, mouths working, and we fed them.

I felt the most unexpected tenderness toward those koi, because they were so beautiful and colorful and, I don’t know, like music made flesh. My mom kept pointing to this one and that one—how red, how orange, how yellow, how golden—and suddenly I couldn’t talk about them because my throat grew tight. I knew if I talked about them, my voice would tremble, and I might even tear up. I wondered what was wrong with me. They were just fish. Maybe I was turning sissy, but at least I fed the last of the bread to them without embarrassing myself.

Almost half a century later, I feel that same tenderness toward nearly everything that swims and flies and walks on all fours, and I’m not embarrassed. Creation moves and astonishes if you let it. When I realize how unlikely it is that anything at all should live on this world spun together from dust and hot gases, that creatures of almost infinite variety should at night look up at the stars, I know that it’s all more fragile than it appears, and I think maybe the only thing that keeps the Earth alive and turning is our love for it.

That day in the park, after the koi, we walked the paths through the groves of trees and through the picnic grounds and around the baseball field. There weren’t as many people as I expected, probably because it was a workday. But when we started to talk about lunch, two guys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, fell in behind us, walking close to us, moving faster if we moved faster, slowing when we did. They were talking about girls they dated the night before, how hot the girls were and things they did to them. They wanted my mother to hear. I didn’t know all the words they used, didn’t understand everything they were bragging about having done, but I knew they were being rotten. That kind of thing didn’t happen often back then. It just didn’t. People wouldn’t tolerate it. People weren’t so afraid in those days. I threw the two trash talkers a couple of mean looks, and my mother said, “No, Jonah,” and kept walking toward the Kellogg Parkway exit from the Commons. But the braggarts talked filthier and started to comment on my mother’s shapeliness.

Finally she stopped and turned to them, one hand in her purse, and said, “Back off.”

One of them was a white kid, the other a mulatto, which was a word we used back then, meaning half black, half white. They were cocky and grinning, hoping to terrify her a little if nothing else.

The white one raised his eyebrows. “Back off? This here’s a public park, sugar. Ain’t it a public park, bro?”

His friend said, “It’s damn sure public. Man, the front view’s even more righteous than her ass.”

My mom raised her purse, her hand buried in it, and said, “You have a death wish?”

The white guy’s grin went from Cheshire to shark. “Sugar, there ain’t hardly any legal guns in this city, so what you’ve got in that purse is just a tampon.”

She stared at him as if he were a cockroach with pretensions, standing upright and talking, but a cockroach nonetheless. “Listen, shithead, do I look like some schoolteacher who cares what the law says? Look at me. You think I’m some hotel maid or dime-store clerk? Is that really what I look like to you, asshole? What I’ve got is a drop gun, no history to it. I kill you both, throw down the piece, and when the jackboots show up, I tell ’em you pulled the heat, it was robbery, but you fumbled, dropped it, I snatched it, thought you might have another one, so I used it. Either you walk away or we do it now, I don’t care which.”

All the wicked fun had gone out of their grins. They looked now as if they were wincing in pain, though there was cold fury in their eyes. I didn’t know how it might go, even in bright sunshine with other strollers in view, but my fear was exceeded by an exhilarating amazement. Sylvia’s performance had been so convincing that she almost seemed to be someone other than my mom, who never used bad language and who was as likely to be carrying a gun as I was likely to have earned a black belt in karate.

The two creeps salvaged their pride by insulting her—“Bitch” and “Skank” and worse—but they backed off and turned away. We stood watching them until we were certain they wouldn’t come back.

My mother said, “Just because you heard me use a couple of nasty words doesn’t mean you ever can.”

I was speechless, but for different reasons from the one that had rendered me silent by the koi pond.

“Jonah? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then tell me what I said.”

“Not to use nasty words.”

“Do you understand why I used them?”

“You faked out those guys.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“You faked them out big-time.”