The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

the obvious. A man from outside, though, he’ll take his chance on the peculiar, because he doesn’t know it’s peculiar. Success out of naivete. That’s my motto. Speaking of the Weetabix, when are you driving up to Vancouver?”
    “Day after tomorrow. Are you
sure
they’re contraband? I can’t fathom the idea of contraband breakfast cereal. Can’t you just order them from some local distributor?“
    “Not a chance of it. And as I was saying, there’s not a restaurant in the continental United States that serves them, not that I’ve heard of. All the best restaurants in England and Canada wouldn’t open up without a supply. Used to be you could get something called Ruskets. These Ruskets weren’t identical to Weetabix, of course, but they were close—flat little biscuits of wheat flakes. Some people broke them up before pouring on the milk and sugar; other people dropped them into the bowl whole, then cut them apart with a spoon. I had a friend who crushed them with his hands first. What’s the use of that, I asked him. Might as well eat anything—Wheaties, bran flakes; it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. That’s the point here, the strategy. Give the customer something out of the ordinary. Make it wholesome, but don’t make it like the competition makes it or you’re good as dead.”
    “But all the way to Canada in the pickup truck?”
    “Don’t use the truck. They’d probably just confiscate the crates of Weetabix at the border—spot them in a second. They’d wonder what in the world a man is doing smuggling Weetabix in an old pickup truck when he’s supposed to be in Vancouver at a convention for writers of columns for the lovelorn. The truck doesn’t run worth a damn anyway. Fill the trunk of your car. That’ll be enough. We’ll make another run somehow in a few months.” He paused for a moment and thought. “I’ll pay for gas.”
    Pickett nodded, as if he trusted Andrew’s weird native genius for this type of thing, for seeing things roundaboutly and inside out and upside down. It was too easy to doubt him, and if there was anything that Beams Pickett distrusted, it was anything that was too easy. Simplicity almost always wore a clever disguise. If he was caught with the Weetabix at the border, he could claim ignorance. “Contraband? Breakfast cereal?” What would they do to him, shoot him?
    “When does the first lovelorn column appear, anyway?” Andrew asked.
    “Friday after next. I’m still putting it together. It’ll run daily in the
Herald
, but if it’s good enough, I don’t see why I can’t syndicate it sooner or later. Georgia’s helping me with it.”
    “Lots of letters? How does anyone know to write?”
    “I’m making them up, actually, addresses and all. Georgia’s answering them. She’s too bluff, though. Too unkind for my tastes. Her advice to everyone is to dry up. I submitted a letter by a woman in Southgate whose husband had lost interest. ‘Lose weight, get a face lift, and tell him to go to hell,’ that was Georgia’s response.
My
advice was to buy diaphanous nighties and packets of bath herbs. That’s going to be my standard response, I think.”
    “Bath herbs?”
    Pickett nodded. “You can order them through women’s magazines—little bags of dried apples and rose hips and lavender. You mix them into the tub water along with bath oils and then climb in, winking at your mate, you know, provocatively. Turns them into sexual dynamos, apparently.”
    “And all this stuff floats on the bathwater? God help us. Isn’t there an easier method?”
    “It’s the rage,” said Pickett. “The word from the public is that they want whatever’s the rage. That’s one reason I’m going up to Vancouver. The convention up there is the cutting edge of the lovelorn business.”
    “That’s where we part company,” said Andrew. “The science of breakfast cereals runs counter to that, and I mean to prove it. To hell with the rage. To hell with the