by Gil Meynier
Mayhew looked at her as she spoke. She was no longer crying.
A little farm, heh? thought Mayhew.
And she told him of the corn, the goat, the pasture. And the poor tenants who could not make a go of it. It was not their fault, poor things. But, still, it was true that everything grows for those who like to plant. The tenants just didn’t know how. And they were discouraged.
Mayhew listened patiently as she told him about the early days of the farm. He listened but he was not paying much attention. When she came to a pause, he waited for a while, then he said:
“Mrs. Jard...”
She looked at him.
“Have you ever thought of marrying again?”
He felt a tingle of excitement as he asked.
She looked away. Mayhew’s mouth puckered as he watched her, waiting to see what she would say.
She looked at her hands, which were folded in her lap, and said:
“I often think about it.”
In the oppressive heat of the silent house they spent most of the afternoon chatting about various things. And, the more he thought about it, the more Mayhew thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea. No, he could do much worse than tie up with Mrs. Jard and her little farm. Not a bad idea at all.
“Leave Joe to me,” he said.
And Mrs. Jard thought that Mayhew was very kind and, in many ways, quite a wonderful man.
But then, she had always thought so.
From the sharp, tall crest of the Catalina Mountains in the north to the pale skyline of the Santa Rita range, some forty miles away to the south, and from the massive lines of the Rincons in the east to the jagged, gloomy spires of the Tucson Mountains in the west, some thirty miles apart, the rugged southern Arizona landscape lay passively in the sun, thirsty for water and longing for shade.
To the southwest, past the elephant head of the Santa Ritas, the vista stretched for sixty miles over distant, shimmering, pale-blue mountain ranges. Northwest escaping between the Catalinas and the Tucsons, the view swept across a plain to the lone tooth of Picacho Peak, fifty miles away, and to the faint horizon beyond.
A few thick ribbons of paved roads, patched in spots or proudly smooth, wiggled out of town and flicked their mirages toward the cardinal points. A number of dirt roads, pitifully small for the vastness of the landscape, coiled to spring over the foothills and the mountains or wandered through mesquite and desert growth toward lonely windmills, hidden ranches and sun-baked settlements.
On their reservations in the hills or at the bend of the road near the white mission on the flat, Indians, perhaps astonished at their fate, possibly amused, certainly resigned, in tribal silence did their chores while their invaded land, with commerce and Rotary, advertising, drinks and radio, tried to catch up with the rest of the Union.
As the earth slowly rolled its heated belly away from the burning sun, shadows lengthened and in the frigid layers of the sky billowy clouds piled up, blinding white against the blue or leaden-gray in each other’s shadow. Majestically out of reach, they floated by, displaying their tantalizing moisture to the panting valley below. Some day, soon, it would rain. Precious, cooling rains would fall on the countryside. But not today, and not from these clouds. They were headed for distant mountain ranges over which, in a sudden tumult of thunder and furious flashes, they would spill silvery cataracts on shivering peaks. But some day soon the rains were due. And spectacular rains they would be, preceded by dust storms and lashing winds, accompanied by all the drums of heaven, followed by an immense calm and the murmur of the water as it slithered on the ground, in gullies and through the glistening town.
But today, in the dry afternoon, hawks were soaring, alert and watchful, on rising towers of warm air; gophers and horny toads darted and stopped and scurried beneath the scrub on the harsh, hot ground. Rabbits, vulnerable and fretful, fled from moving shadows and crackling bushes. Birds fluttered in hurried swoops.
As the sun settled behind the Tucson Mountains a last flurry of activity rippled through the swarming desert. It died down gradually as the shadow of the mountains quickly swept the valley, across canyons, flats and wilds, shrouding the spiny cacti in their frozen attitudes.
Some people looked at the sunset.
They saw a tremendous billow of white and gray pass before the sun to be pierced by a cluster of clear lances of golden light. They saw serried squadrons of clouds turn pink, burst into yellow brilliance, tumble and stretch and fade away into moon whiteness. They saw drifting clouds outlined in luminous, ever-moving festoons. They saw prancing horses, flowing glaciers, melting mountains, mountainous waves, rolling, twisting, merging, floating by.
Joe did not look at the sunset. In the darkness of a junk shop, the fourth he had visited that afternoon, he moved slowly along the cluttered aisles, trying to line up a shielding bulk of tawdry goods between him and the yellow-bearded old man who sat at a work-bench near the door.
Under his arm he carried a brittle, dog-eared magazine he had bought for a penny in a second-hand bookstore. He had said that he was looking around when he had come in and the old man had shrugged his shoulders.
A leprous chest of drawers with a cracked mirror served the purpose. He looked aimlessly around for a while, then he took the rolled magazine from under his arm. Trying not to move his shoulders, using the rolled magazine as a scoop, he prodded delicately through a tray of kitchen utensils.
When he placed the magazine back under his arm and walked away, he could feel the square wooden handle of the shining ice pick through the paper as he held it against his side.
He walked idly along the aisles for a while longer, past racks of old clothes, past trays of oily, dusty valves and faucets, past the old man at the workbench, moving slowly toward the door.
As he was about to step outside the old man called him back.
“That’ll be fifteen cents.”
9
JOE was in his room. Sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, his elbows on his knees, his fists crushing his mouth, he felt a powerful fury rising in him. A fury that was on the verge of exploding, a fury set on a hair trigger, born of the smoldering rage that had made him hurl the ice pick into the partition.
The ice pick. Useless, now that it could be traced to him. Let it stick there, in the partition, where everybody could see it. There was no law against having an ice pick sticking in the wall.
He was tired of being pushed around.
He was trying to be nice to everybody and they were all pulling fast ones on him. Look how nice he had been to Dorry and the first chance she gets she goes off with that wop. Who probably wasn’t acting like such a gentleman by now.
And Mayhew. What difference did it make to Mayhew where his rent-money went to! He’d have to pay for his room wherever he was. And Joe’d been nice to him, telling him, okay put the money in the garden if you want to. That lousy, phony garden. It was a fast one because the old man had not said anything about the money until first mentioning that he had been out the night before and had seen the black Packard with Joe in it.
And that eternal puckering of the mouth, as if he were kissing somebody. Joe was getting damned tired of that pucker. It was insulting and disturbingly obscene. His white hair, his mocking blue eyes, his pink face. Every time he thought about Mayhew he saw that pucker, that irritating, unfathomable pucker.
Joe rubbed his mouth and spat as if someone had given him a dirty kiss.
And that wasn’t all. What the hell was Mayhew doing taking Mrs. Jard downtown? He had seen them halfway to town as he came home around sundown. For a couple of seconds Joe held his breath as he remembered seeing the two of them walking to town. Then he jumped up and hurried into the hall. He turned the knob on Mayhew’s door. It was locked. At any other time he Would have grinned but this time he did not bother. With the broken blade of his pocketknife he removed two screws from the piece of hardware which should have been mounted on the room side of the door, and as he put them and the dismantled pie
ce of the door lock in the breast pocket of his shirt, the door slowly swung open by itself.
Standing in front of the dresser, he reached up with both hands and tried to jiggle Mayhew’s suitcase. It was good and heavy. It took quite an effort to budge it. He had often watched Mayhew through the knothole and seen him open the suitcase. It was full of books. He wondered if the old man stole books from libraries. Well, anyway, it was good and heavy.
He peered behind it and saw that it was sitting square in front of the knothole.
He went back to his room. Standing on his bed, he reached for the top of the curtain and lifted it from the near bracket; then, the other end still resting on the far bracket, he lowered his end of the curtain until the smooth, round, solid brass rod spilled out of the hem of the dusty material onto the bed. Caught on the far bracket, the curtain hung limply as Joe climbed onto the dresser. Pushing the rod through the knothole was simple. He left it dangling there and went back to Mayhew’s room and carefully lined up the edge of the suitcase with the edge of the shelf. Then he climbed back on his dresser again and, gently, shoved the curtain rod toward the suitcase. First, he angled the rod up toward the top of the suitcase, near the handle. Pushing, he found he could make the heavy suitcase teeter on its outside edge. A good shove would make it topple over.
Then he tried pushing it lower down. Checking from the other side, he found that the suitcase had slid sideways on the shelf and that there was no telling where it would land. It definitely had to be shoved from the top, near the handle.
Then he discovered why it had been harder to shove the suitcase sideways. There was a ridge of oilcloth which hung in scallops from the edge of the shelf. It was held on with thumbtacks. Sliding against the oilcloth, the suitcase had crumpled the thick material against one of the thumbtacks.
Pushing from anywhere but the top, near the handle, was no good.
“But ..said Joe, examining the edge of the shelf. If he placed a couple of extra thumbtacks, sticking up a little, near the corners of the suitcase, it would hold back the bottom edge of the suitcase just enough to be sure that it would topple over and fall straight.
But there were no extra thumbtacks around and Joe did not recall seeing any loose ones around the house.
And he wasn’t going to go out and steal some and be caught at it. Which reminded him of the old crum at the junk shop.
Joe spat again, closed the door and replaced the screws and the piece of hardware on the door-frame.
And then, there was Mac. Getting somebody else just because he had made a mistake of a few dollars, a couple of measly bucks! He wouldn’t feel so damned smart if he knew how many times Joe had held out on him. But that racket was all over now. And this was a sobering thought. Joe pulled out his wallet and, once more, counted his money. Nineteen bucks was all he had. And, if he should decide to take Dorry out again, after all, he’d need some more. In any case he’d need more money pretty soon, but specially if he should decide to give the girl another chance. He suddenly wondered whether it wouldn’t be smarter to lay off the rental cars for a while, or whether it would look funny to the sheriff’s snooper if he did. He’d-have to put that aside and think about it.
To come back to Mac, the Italian had sure looked sore when Joe told him that Mac had said he didn’t want to meet any punks. That was like telling the Italian he was a punk. He wondered if it would be necessary to bring it up again. Stringer had said: “We’ll take care of Mac.”
He wondered what Stringer was going to do about it. It would be fun to see Mac get pushed around a bit.
As another possibility, Joe wondered what the effect of an anonymous letter to the owner of the gambling joint would be.
But the immediate job at hand was to have a crack at Mayhew’s moneybelt. A moneybelt is a smart way of carrying your money around, Joe thought. Nobody could get at it without your knowing it. You’d certainly wake up if somebody tried anything in your sleep, unless you were dead drunk. And Mayhew didn’t drink, or if he did drink, Joe had never seen him pass out, and he had watched him enough through the knothole to know. And there was no use waiting for the old man to faint from the heat or from overwork in his garden. He didn’t work that hard! It would have to be an accident. Like a suitcase falling off the shelf, with Mayhew under it.
The next thing to do was to put another hole in the partition, below the shelf, for a clear view of Mayhew when the rod was pushed through the knothole.
While he was working at this—the ice pick was not entirely useless—he paused to wonder where Mrs. Fred was, not that it mattered very much. He walked down the hall as far as the great velvet curtains. Past the darkness of Mrs. Jard’s cubbyhole, in the waning light of day, he could see Mrs. Fred’s legs and feet in high-laced shoes and printed cotton on the bed. Her toes were sticking up. He went in.
“Hello, honey,” he said.
Mrs. Fred, her legs straight, was sitting almost upright against three big pillows, her hands folded, her hat on.
By the time Joe seated himself on the box with the chintz cover Mrs. Fred seemed to react to his entrance and his greeting.
She nodded her head and smiled. Joe was used to her. He knew that she would stop nodding her head after a while.
“How’s everything in this part of the world?” he asked.
She stopped nodding and, with a pleased expression, she said:
“Hello, Joe.”
So, thought Joe, the old gal is in a talkative mood. And he settled back against the wall.
“Aren’t you kind of hot with your hat on?” he asked.
He expected no direct answer. Eventually she said:
“You’re a good boy. Like a son.”
This gave him a cute idea.
“Sure. Are you going to leave your house to me when you die?”
“It hasn’t been very hot today,” said Mrs. Fred, nodding again.
Joe waited for a while. He knew that she was always a few sentences behind. Finally she broke the silence.
“There is no house,” she said.
“What was that?” said Joe.
She began to rock herself against the pillows.
“There is no-o-o house,” she chanted.
Joe waited.
“No house,” she said. Then she added: “It belongs to the city.”
“Aw, you talk like a crazy woman,” he said.
He leaned forward, then he leaned back again and reached for his pocketknife to pare his fingernails.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
She nodded with a wise look on her face. There was a long wait because Joe did not want to get her of! the subject.
“When they put in the sidewalks and the pavement around the house...they said the house belonged to them.”
She seemed to think this over.
“No. That’s not what they said,” she finally decided. “It was after the sidewalks were put in. They said if I didn’t pay for them the house would belong to the city.”
This was something new to Joe. He had never heard of people paying for sidewalks. Not where he came from.
The old lady started to speak again.
“Mr. Fredenham never said anything about sidewalks before he went away. So now the house belongs to the city.”
“That’s crazy,” said Joe.
“The house and the land,” said Mrs. Fred, and she chanted it over again. “The house and the land.”
Joe spat on the blade and scraped the dingy surface of his thumbnail. It was whitish and pinkish underneath. What the hell was all this about the house! She was probably out of her head. The house surely belonged to her.
“I don’t like that man digging up the yard,” said Mrs. Fred after a silence.
Joe did not answer.
“Have you got change for five?” he asked.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. This time it didn’t. She had no money anyway. Mrs. Jard had explained to him that all Mrs. Fred had, in the way of cash, was what sh
e, Mrs. Jard, put in the old lady’s dresser drawer now and then. It paid for the lights and the water bill. And just now, as Joe well knew, the drawer was empty.
The old lady frowned.
“I meant to ask you something,” she said.
“What was it?”
She couldn’t seem to remember. He waited.
“Forgotten now,” she said, after a while. And she shrugged her shoulders.
It might have been something interesting.
“Go on,” said Joe, “think about it. What was it you wanted to ask me?”
She looked out the window. The mountains were barely visible. The street lights had been turned on against the coming of darkness but it was still too light for them to shine.
“What was it?” said Joe.
He had nothing to do. He might as well sit with the old lady until somebody came home. Dorry, for instance. What a set-up, though! Nobody in the house. He was alone with the old lady. If he wanted to do anything, now would be the time. He could even slip out of the house again and say he had never been there.
“Go on,” he said, “tell me what it was.”
It was funny about the old lady. She looked so big and tall and yet she hardly weighed anything. Joe had helped her come down a ladder once. Her arms were thin, and you could tell that her legs, on the bed, had no flesh on them.
“Well, what was it?”
Funny about people, thought Joe. You don’t know them from Adam and you get mixed up with them worse than you do with your own family. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend that this old gal was his mother. They got along fine together. He’d inherit everything she had and everybody for miles around would come to him and pay their rent and he’d wear a money-belt and shorts and a T-shirt and he’d be tan and healthy-looking and Mrs. Jard would shine his shoes every day and Mayhew, a deaf-and-dumb stumblebum he had taken in out of charity, would rake the yard and never be allowed in the house and Dorry would be his number-one woman and the others would have to accept her and shut up about it.
