by Gil Meynier
With a dry, aching throat and on legs that felt like cotton he hurried home.
4
IT was dark in her room when Dorry woke up. She had been lying in semi-consciousness, the tail end of a deep sleep, when all at once she was awake. She remembered that just before waking up she had felt physically content, she had turned lazily toward the center of the bed, waiting for that fellow’s arm to gather her in and rest heavily on her while they slept some more. But something, she didn’t know what, had jarred her indistinct thoughts into wakefulness and suddenly nothing made any sense.
She could see the dim outline of strange windows. She was in a large, dark room and her heart was beating very fast. The soundless quiet which underlay the darkness was frightening.
Then the discomfort of the twisted underclothes in which she had slept reminded her of what had happened and she knew where she was. And she wondered what time it was. She went to one of the windows and raised it. The night air was cool. She found a light switch. She had a wrist watch but she wore it only for looks. The winding stem had been broken off a long time ago.
She put on her dressing gown, opened the door and looked into the hall. There must be a clock somewhere. Across the hall was the living room. Her open door threw enough light for her to peer into the living room and down the hall. There was a rocking chair at the edge of the living room. A deep sofa faced the front window. At the back of the room there was a strange piece of furniture. It was a stiff, wooden seat large enough for two people and it hung from the ceiling on chains like a porch swing. There was no other furniture in the living room. No clock.
Advancing timidly down the hall, she saw great dark curtains on the left, next to her room. She halted nervously when she heard the sound of deep, steady breathing behind the curtains. Her heart began to beat fast again and she almost went back to her room. But she saw a woman’s shoes on the floor at the edge of the curtain and they reassured her.
At the end of the hall there was a door, partly open. As she came nearer she could see that it was the bathroom. She went in, found the light and closed the door. It was a funny old bathroom. The tub was made of tin and had been painted cream color. There was an old-style water tank near the ceiling with a chain hanging from it. The floor was polished and all the woodwork was oak, including the seat. There was a smell of old wax and sour plumbing.
When she returned to her room, Dorry still did not know what time it was. She turned off the light and opened all the windows. She could feel the cool night air outside but it did not seem to enter the room. The room was a cube filled with warm, stuffy air. She took off her dressing gown and the rest of her things and stretched out naked on the bed.
She was asleep again when dawn broke and Joe looked in her window.
Mayhew heard Joe come in the front door and go to his room. He pursed his lips a couple of times and called out through the thin partition:
“Stayed out kind of late tonight, young fellow!”
But he received no answer except the sound of bedsprings as Joe angrily rolled over on his bed, faced the wall and cursed the world in general.
Somewhere near the golf course the sheriff’s men picked up a drunk who had been hit by a car and took him to the county hospital. He was in pretty bad shape.
The early-morning hours in Tucson follow a regular pattern. The sun, yellow and hot, rises in a cloudless sky over the Rincon Mountains. Its first horizontal rays sweep across the plain, brush along the Catalinas and bounce off the Tucson Mountains in the west. Then, relentlessly, the sunshine ferrets out every remnant of night coolness in the canyons, in every fold of ground and behind every closed window. By midmorning everything is hot to the touch and every color is vivid to the eye.
It was seven-thirty in the morning when Mrs. Jard returned from her daily trip to the professor’s. The sun was already high in the sky and she could tell that this was going to be another hot day. By contrast it felt cool behind the thick adobe walls of the old house. Mrs. Jard made coffee. Carefully balancing a full cup on a large saucer, she went down the hall to the front bedroom. She knocked softly, opened the door and went in, saying:
“It’s only me.”
She smiled at the startled girl who was lying on the bed with a sheet hastily clutched to her chin.
“I thought you’d be awake...first morning in a strange house,” she said.
Dorry sat up to take the cup that was offered to her. She smiled and Mrs. Jard sat on the bed and watched her drink the coffee.
“I make good coffee,” said Mrs. Jard.
“Yes. You do,” said Dorry.
At that moment everything seemed just right. Dorry had an instinctive feeling—and she usually trusted her instinctive feelings—that Mrs. Jard was a friendly person. Not nosy, but friendly. And Mrs. Jard liked Dorry right away.
“My goodness, you don’t want the heat to come in,” said Mrs. Jard, and she rose to shut the windows.
“Let me do it,” said Dorry, and between them they closed the windows and pulled the window shades almost all the way down.
Dorry was rounded and well-shaped; her legs were not the thin, fragile kind, but sturdy without being heavy; her hips and back and shoulders w,ere well modeled and feminine. In the moderate light of the room, tinted by the sunlight that made the tan-colored shades glow across the windows, Dorry looked golden and warm and pretty. Before going back to bed she put on her dressing gown.
Mrs. Jard did not quite know how to offer her help. She knew that there was probably very little she could do for the girl, but whatever it was she wanted to offer to do it.
“If this is your first time here,” she said, “maybe there are things you’d like to know about the town.”
This was a brave offer because poor Mrs. Jard realized that perhaps she could tell Dorry how the town had been in the old days but she knew very little of what the younger people had made of the town since then.
“I may have to find a job,” said Dorry.
Jobs. That was one thing Mrs. Jard knew nothing about.
Young people found all sorts of jobs and Mrs. Jard did not understand how they went about it or exactly what the jobs were.
“Maybe Joe could help me find one,” said Dorry.
The old woman was silent.
She wanted to say: “Don’t have too much to do with Joe. He is no good.” She felt helpless because, so soon, she had come up against that invisible wall that separates young people from old. You can see them move beyond that wall but it is not easy to understand what they are doing.
She shook her head.
“I wouldn’t know about Joe.”
“Oh, well, I’ll find something,” said Dorry, gaily. Gaily because the old lady suddenly looked troubled and Dorry wanted to cheer her up, to pay her back for the coffee. And she continued to talk because the old lady had smiled and Dorry liked to see her smile. “You see, I’m just waiting...”
That was the trouble; when Dorry started to talk she had to go into her lies.
“I’m just waiting for a certain fellow to come for me. We’re going to be married.”
“Are you, now?” said Mrs. Jard. “That’s nice. And he’s going to come for you! Me, I was sent for. I did my waiting at home. What made you leave home, darling?”
She did not mean to pry. It had seemed like a natural question to ask. But now Dorry was looking the other way, and her face, which had been open and smiling, had slowly closed and she was staring.
They heard footsteps in the hall. The shuffling stopped at Dorry’s door, then went on into the living room and the two women heard the creaking of the rocking chair.
Mrs. Jard rose from the armchair and whispered:
“I’d better be going.”
She picked up the cup and saucer and scurried out of the room.
Joe joined her in the kitchen.
“Look,” he said in a hard voice, “I don’t want you annoying my friends.”
“I only took her a cup of coffee.”
“You stick your nose into my business and I don’t like it.”
Mrs. Jard went back to her room and sat behind the curtain. She had nothing to do all day and this was the best place to sit to be out of Joe’s way.
In the back yard Mrs. Fredenham, in her leather jacket, wearing a wilted straw hat, was looking at an old pile of adobe bricks. A sun-baked mixture of earth and straw, the large adobes had been made on the property many years before and had been neatly stacked to dry and await use on some long-forgotten project. Time and the sun and the rains had had their effect on the old adobes. The rains had melted them, and the once sharp-angled pile of bricks was now a mound of eroded, brittle, tan cakes of earth slowly melting back into the tan ground from which they had come.
Mrs. Fred looked at them for a long time.
I wonder what we are going to use those for, she thought.
It was mid-morning when Mayhew walked back from the library. The sun was hot but it felt good to his back as it reached him between the pepper trees that lined the street. A little girl about three years old said hello to him and, lips pursed and whistling to himself, he made a magnificent bow to her as he walked by.
Waiting at a corner for a car to pass, he chuckled to himself.
That was a fine sentence he had read that morning. Appreciatively he repeated it to himself: ..he talks with as great assurance as if he understood what he pretends to know.” That was from the writings of Ned Ward, a tavern keeper in London in the 1690’s. A tavern keeper and a writer. A columnist, really. Wasn’t that a fine sentence:
“He talks...”
Talk, talk, talk; people talk, talk, talk, or write editorials, or speak at banquets, people who know everything and understand nothing, ready to make speeches to all comers, on all occasions, “with as great assurance ..”I am the expert, you listen to me, without fear of contradiction; why, it was only yesterday ..”as if he understood what he pretends to know.* As if he understood what he pretends to know. That, to Mayhew’s mind, was a devastating sentence. It could have been written about people of today instead of about a Londoner of 1690. He guessed that the sentence would last as long as there was anyone left to exercise man’s inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself. “Man’s inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” Where did that sentence come from?
Yes. It came from that fellow with whom he had a discussion about law. The fellow’s point was that laws do not tell you that you cannot do certain things; they only tell you that you are a damn fool for doing them. Laws can’t stop you from driving through stop signs or batting your wife on the head; they only tell you it is not a good idea. While laws cannot keep you from making a damn fool of yourself of your own free choice, they are designed to afford some protection to others while you are making a damn fool of yourself.
A rather good point, thought Mayhew.
Take driving. A car is built to go fast, but man isn’t. But man likes to go faster than he was built to go. This is the sort of thing that led to chariot racing in the days of Rome. May-hew was willing to bet that they had plenty of traffic accidents in those days. They probably complained then that highway accidents were taking more lives than the bow and arrow, or the mace and slingshot, or the catapult, or whatever they used to kill one another in warfare. Mayhew could imagine Caesar enacting a city ordinance saying that it shall be unlawful to drive a horse in the streets of Rome faster than a citizen can run.
Mayhew hurried on toward the house.
He felt entitled to another look at the girl in the front bedroom. He had had but an unsatisfactory glimpse of her during the night. When she had walked back to her room he had been standing in the kitchen, eating leftover ham, in the dark, watching her. It would have scared her if she had come into the kitchen instead of walking down the hall to her room. She certainly would have bumped into him. A soft, pleasant thing. Just imagine a woman’s scream in the middle of the night in the quiet old adobe house! Mrs. Jard would have fallen right out of bed. Mrs. Fred would probably have slept right through it. It was just as well she hadn’t come into the kitchen. She might have thought he was spying on her.
Mayhew chuckled. He would have had to explain that he often woke up hungry in the night. Of course, he had been interested in seeing what the girl looked like.
Joe was sitting in the rocker when Mayhew came in.
He was paring his fingernails with his pocketknife. His hair, freshly watered, was slicked back, but the stubble on his face made him look particularly unhealthy this morning.
“What’s the matter, Joe? Insomnia?”
Joe looked at Mayhew for a moment.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“You didn’t get much sleep last night,” said Mayhew in a voice that made a mockery of the paternal interest the words suggested.
“What’s it to you?” said Joe.
Mayhew cocked his head, puckered his lips and decided that it was nothing to him.
“Well, then, mind your own business.”
“That, I try to do. Occasionally one becomes interested in one’s fellow human beings. It is seldom rewarding.”
Joe frowned and tried to extract some direct meaning from Mayhew’s words.
“You’re full of hooey,” he said and he resumed the paring of his fingernails. But instead of running the blade along the nails, he ran his thumb across the blade as if testing the sharpness of the knife.
“When are you going to pay me some rent?” he asked suddenly.
Mayhew placed his hat on the floor and relaxed in a corner of the sofa. He had been expecting this question and he had prepared an answer.
“My boy,” he said, “the time has come for you to know that I have made other arrangements.”
“You’re moving out? It’s all right with me.”
“No, my boy, on the contrary, I am staying.”
Mayhew took his time about it. He enjoyed tarrying over conversations. He smiled, crossed his pudgy legs, pursed his lips a few times, enjoyed the feeling that he was causing great irritation to Joe and probably was about to cause a great deal more.
Joe watched the pink-faced, white-haired old man. Lately he had taken to puckering his lips. Then he’d smile as if he enjoyed a private joke. And he’d pucker his lips again. Joe was getting fed up with it.
Mayhew had been the first person to answer the ad. It had said, “Rm for R.,” and the address. Joe had sat on the porch all that day to greet the customers like long-lost friends. Mrs. Fred had told Joe when he moved in that any of his friends were welcome. So he figured he might as well make some easy money on rents and had put the ad in the paper. And Mrs. Fred seemed happy to see that he had so many friends. But she had no interest in them. The more people came the more she stayed outside, puttering with the fence, straightening out shingles from the top of a ladder, watching the hens.
Every time Joe told her about a new friend, she said, “I’m glad,” and went on about her business.
And Mayhew had been the first. Joe had not known any better than to charge him ten bucks a month, which he had paid regularly for the first few months. But, little by little, he had slackened off.
And now, this.
“So?” said Joe.
“So, my dear boy,” said Mayhew, “I have decided to pay my rent directly to our kind hostess. But, as the dear lady is not interested in money, as we all know, my contribution will be in the form of a vegetable garden.”
“And when did you decide that?”
“Last night, my dear boy, as you were driving around.”
“And what makes you think I was driving around?” said Joe, his knife poised in his right hand.
“I happened to be out, myself, last night. Although I didn’t stay out quite so long as you did.”
“What I do is none of your damned business,” said Joe automatically while his mind was occupied with the information that Mayhew had been out the night before and had seen him. It had startled him for a moment. Then, rea
lizing that the old man had been in his room when he came in at dawn, he felt pretty certain that Mayhew could not know anything of what had happened near the golf course. The rest did not matter too much.
But he wondered where, during the night, the old man had seen him. Losing the ten bucks a month was not so much—he hadn’t been getting it very regularly anyway—but having the old man around the house was getting to be a nuisance. Joe didn’t for a moment believe that fairy tale about the vegetable garden. Mayhew was just giving him the business and there wasn’t much Joe could do about it.
Joe decided to fool him.
“I don’t care what you do about the rent. I don’t need the money. Put it in the garden if you want to.”
“I thought you would see it my way,” said Mayhew.
Joe shrugged his shoulders.
“Despite the years that separate us,” said Mayhew, whose affectation it was to employ the florid turn of phrase, “we understand each other very well.”
“Aw, shuddup,” said Joe, returning to his nail-paring.
“Well...nimini pimini!” said Mayhew as he rose and went down the hall to his room.
Now, what the hell does that mean? thought Joe and he was sure that in some subtle way the old man was mocking him. One of these days I’ll get him. And I’ll get him good.
He spent the rest of the morning in the rocker. He thought about ice picks. Once, for the hell of it, he had stabbed a raw leg of lamb with an ice pick that was lying around. It had seemed to go in pretty easily once it got past the outside layer of skin. Not real easy, but easy enough, considering that it was not even a sharp ice pick.
If you heat an ice pick over a flame it takes the temper out of it and the next time you use it it will bend like a pretzel.
There was no ice pick in Mrs. Fred’s house. He was sure of that. He knew the contents of the house pretty well.
Now, how would you go about it if you wanted to get yourself an ice pick? If you bought one in a store, somebody might remember when you bought it. You couldn’t ask the ice man to give you one. You’d have to steal one.
