Spoonbenders

“Okay, so sometimes—and I never knew why she did it sometimes and not others—she’d say, I see you left somebody home tonight. They’re at home watching television. It’s a man, yes? A man with reddish hair—or a blonde woman, whatever. And then Dad would bring out the telephone, and they’d run the sound through the speakers so everyone could hear, and Mom would say, Why don’t I call home for you? And bam, she’d dial the number without even asking ’em.” Frankie shook his head in remembered amazement. He was sweating even though the van’s air conditioner was blasting. “Brought down the house, Matty. When that guy or gal answered, just like she said they would? People went nuts. If she’d done that on TV, the Astounding Archibald would have looked like an idiot, and we’d have been world famous.”

“Mike Douglas!” Matty said.

“The same. Fucker played into Archibald’s hands.”

Finally, somebody had mentioned the television show. After the tape disappeared, Matty was afraid that he’d imagined the whole thing. “But why didn’t she come back out?” he asked.

“Blame Buddy. He kept her from coming out, and he ended the act forever. Nobody found out how great she was. How great we were.”

“But the government knew, right?” Matty asked. “She worked for them?”

“Who told you about the government?” Frankie was driving fast, changing lanes without even checking the side mirrors. “That’s top secret.”

“You’ve brought it up a couple times.”

“Right. Listen carefully, Matthias. Your grandmother, Maureen McKinnon Telemachus…”

“Uh-huh?”

“She was a spy. Maybe the greatest spy ever.” He glanced at Matty. “Oh, do not laugh, my friend.”

“I’m not laughing,” Matty said. And he wasn’t. But Mom said her brother was a bullshitter, and sometimes he worried that Frankie was more interested in a good story than in total accuracy. Then again, Mom was more interested in total accuracy than a good anything. “So,” Matty said. “Did she have, like, a gun?”

“What? No. She was a psychic spy.”

“Okay…”

“Remote viewing,” Frankie said. “We’re talking long-distance, highly targeted clairvoyance. Top psychics from around the country were recruited to locate and detect Soviet assets, stuff the satellites couldn’t find. Missile silos, nuclear submarines, science bunkers, all kinds of shit.”

Science bunkers? Matty thought.

“The Commies did it, too,” Frankie said. He wiped his palm on his pants, then switched hands on the steering wheel and wiped the other one. “They had their own psychics, working to jam ours. Classic Cold War, Matty. High-stakes ops.”

“Wow,” Matty said.

“But all that’s over,” Frankie said. “The wall’s down, and we won. New World Order. And the way I see it, it’s time for some peacetime dividends. Shit.” He almost missed the off-ramp, and jerked the van over. Matty grabbed the dash. Behind them a car honked, and Frankie flipped them the bird even though the driver couldn’t possibly see it. “The question you have to ask yourself is this,” Frankie said. “What’s the market value of your abilities?”

“Right. Sure.”

“You said you wanted to help your mom, right?” He’d confessed to Frankie that he was worried about her. “Then this is your chance. You being my apprentice, that’s great and all, a little cash, every little bit helps. But it’s not a game changer. It doesn’t get your mom out of that shit-hole job, and it doesn’t get you to college. You want to go to college, don’t you?”

“I guess.” He supposed he could go if showbiz didn’t work out.

“The thing is, you can’t go off unprepared. You can’t take your big shot unless you’re absolutely ready. I had my shot once. Your uncle Buddy—well, let me just say, your uncle hung me out to dry. But I have myself to blame for that. I got cocky, believed everything he told me. Thought it was all in the bag, a sure thing, and that makes a man sloppy. I didn’t practice enough. We’re not going to make the same mistake with you.”

Frankie pulled up to a shop called Aces of Pawn and parked in front of a fire hydrant. “If a cop comes, move the car.”

“But—”

Frankie hopped out. “Two minutes, tops!”

Matty turned on the radio to WXRT, but his mind was on what Frankie had been saying about his “big shot.” He pictured himself walking into his mom’s room, putting a bundle of cash in her hand, and saying, “Pack your bags. We’re moving out of here.” Seeing that relief in her face. After she lost her job in Pittsburgh, she’d started hiding her desperation from him. Not that she was cheery, exactly—she’d never been one of those Brady Bunch moms—but she deflected any of his questions about jobs or money with an air of boredom, as if explaining why the electricity had been turned off was a story too tedious to go into. Moving back into Grandpa Teddy’s house hadn’t made the anxiety go away, and for a while it was worse. It was only in the past couple of weeks that the cloud had lifted a bit. Twice now he’d come down for breakfast and caught her whistling. Whistling.