by Gil Meynier
“...the moving mouth made words, relaxed into a smile, puckered again and spoke on, but Joe did not hear it. Can you cut out a mouth, can you stop it, or does it keep on moving like a writhing piece of dead snake? Sometimes the teeth showed, hard, expressionless, and they were clacking at him.
“...of brooms...” Mayhew was saying.
Brooms! My God, thought Joe, I don’t know what he’s talking about. And because, even here, speaking to him, the old man managed to be beyond his reach, Joe’s fury mounted and the typhoon became a drum, taut, booming, and he was whirling in a horrible feeling of not understanding what was happening to him. There was something wrong with him and it scared him.
“...then, again...” Mayhew kept repeating.
He was not hearing words. He strained and held his breath. The drum had changed into a bottomless hole and as he sank into it a rushing noise filled his ears. Mayhew’s voice came through the noise. It droned, then it danced far away, at the other end of a tunnel, then it suddenly blew into a typhoon. And suddenly stopped.
Now the voice spoke again from somewhere in space, clear as the ringing of crystal. Joe felt the bed beneath his body. His feet, unaccountably, were somewhere far away, on a strange level, and he felt as if he were emerging from a great weakness. The voice said:
“Joe!”
He opened his eyes. For a moment he was grateful for the presence of Mayhew’s legs at the side of the bed. Then the feeling that Mayhew was bending over him caused another revulsion. It was taking a little time, but his strength was coming back. When it came back, he would...
...but it went away again as he tried to sit up. He fell back on the bed and, this time, he was grateful for the touch of Mayhew’s hand on his forehead. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing.
“What happened?” he asked after a while,
“You fainted, my boy,” said Mayhew.
Now that the typhoon had subsided he was floating on a calm, gray sea. There were mountains in the distance. Slowly, his thoughts came back. They were the same thoughts he had always had. Nothing had changed. The same dangers were lurking and he wasn’t quite sure what they were. He felt trapped. There was Mayhew. What was he talking about, what the hell did he want? Joe knew that something had to be done. Something smart that would strip Mayhew of any advantage—a fellow did have an advantage over another fellow when the other fellow fainted. If it had been Mayhew fainting, with that moneybelt around him...Joe felt himself smiling. Or perhaps it was only his lips twitching. Mayhew’s hand patted him on the head.
“You’ll be all right,” Mayhew said.
“...something I ate,” said Joe.
But he couldn’t remember eating.
“Sure,” said Mayhew, “something tainted.”
It certainly was easy to fool people! The old man actually believes that it was something I ate, thought Joe. And he wanted to laugh. He did laugh. And Mayhew’s hand became heavier. It slipped to Joe’s shoulder and held him down. He rebelled against it and shook it off and sat up and swung his arm at Mayhew.
“Get the hell out of here,” he shouted.
Mayhew retreated, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and started to leave the room. At the door, he turned, reached into his pocket and held out a small wrinkled handkerchief.
“Here,” he said, “I found this in my room. I thought you might like to have it back.”
And the handkerchief, still showing the folds of an untied knot, fluttered to the pillow.
Joe stared at it for a long time after Mayhew had left.
That does it, he thought. That damn well does it.
And he knew he should have flushed it away. Now he’d have to find a way of flushing Mayhew away.
And, alone in his room, Joe wept, because people were making him do things he didn’t want to do, because life is a big hole and you feel so lonely.
11
DAWN came. Joe did not notice it. He was dimly awake and, behind closed eyelids, he was marshaling his thoughts in battle order. The desert heat had not abated during the night. Perspiring and fretful, he kicked at the dirty, twisted bedsheets.
Dorry did not see the dawn. Rosy and tender-skinned, she lay on her bed, dreaming her dreams, sighing her sighs and stirring gently at the caress of her cheek on her arm. It had been hot and muggy all night and, unaware of her own restlessness, she was reacting to the damp heat as a plant unfurls and stretches in the humid warmth of a hothouse.
Mayhew opened his eyes. The paper had predicted high humidity and probable thunderstorms. Give it a little more time. He closed his eyes patiently and went to sleep again.
Mrs. Fred lay on her bed by the window. Neither awake nor. asleep, the cushion still on her stomach where Joe had left it, still wearing her hat and shoes and cotton dress, she was looking out of the window, passive, unfeeling, not waiting for anything in particular. The dawn had come up chalky. She looked into the low, lead-colored foam. Stray bits of thought, shapeless, aimless, floated and sank and bobbed up again in the gray belly of the dragging clouds.
Mrs. Jard, in her alcove, never really saw the dawn. On bright mornings she saw the reflection of the sunlight on the wall and on the panel of the open door between her cubby-hole and Mrs. Fred’s room. To her left the folds of the great curtains slowly emerged from the darkness and the rounded face of the alarm clock on the dresser caught a gleam from Mrs. Fred’s window. But that was the only dawn Mrs. Jard ever saw in the dark recess of her alcove. This morning, waiting for the time to come around for her to go to the professor’s house, she was sure it was going to rain. Her ankle was hurting.
The great, square adobe house in which they were lying was heavy with the dull heat it had soaked up from endless days of sunshine. In the gray light of dawn, without any warning, a large, important slab of what was left of the stucco once long ago applied to its adobe walls broke off at the eave and slid to the ground, splattering in brittle chunks over Mayhew’s garden. A great crack, hairy with ancient straw, lay exposed, zigzagging deeply among the crumbly, brown adobe bricks of the primitive wall.
Mayhew turned in his sleep. Joe suddenly felt as if he had had an instinctive warning of another danger. He could not figure what it was. He, too, turned over.
Mrs. Fred’s nebulous thoughts floated down from the sluggish clouds and insistently tried to crowd themselves back into her head. She knew that something had happened to the house, but she did not know what. The house and the land, she thought. The brown house and the land. The brown, brown house and the brown, brown land. The brown, brown house. She listened to it chanting in her mind. She thought she should get up. But, instead, she fell asleep; her first sleep since Joe had left her room. She had finally remembered what it was she wanted to tell him. Now, as she fell asleep, it was drifting away and she was forgetting it again.
Dorry almost woke up. Out of her dream a thought sprang with the clarity of daytime perception. There was no dog. The sign had said: Beware...but there was no dog. Not a single dog around the house. Happy, and for a fraction of a second grinning, she nestled her head in the crook of her elbow, rhumbaed her bare hips into the bedding and returned to deep sleep.
The clap of thunder startled them all. The first percussion of it shook the house and its rolling aftermath rumbled crazily and rattled the windows.
Joe, who had been thrashing on his bed, sprang up at the first crash, frightened, his heart skidding around in his chest.
Mayhew made a face as if the noise had hurt him and, instinctively, began to count. At “three” he realized that one should count from lightning to thunder, not from thunder to lightning. Which just shows, he thought, what silly things people will do. He propped himself up and composed himself to enjoy the rest of the storm as a great, free spectacle.
Mrs. Jard thought: Well, now, it didn’t have to be so loud, then she wondered if Mrs. Fred would sleep through this one as she usually did. Holding her big breasts in her arm, she crawled to the foot of her bed and peeked into Mrs
. Fred’s room. Sweet thing, she thought, this time she has her hat on.
Mrs. Jard shook her head. Perhaps she should undress her every night. But Mrs. Fred would never stand for it. No, she would never stand for it. She had tried it once, and when she had had her nicely put to bed, the stubborn old girl had gotten dressed again and had gone into the yard. Well, thought Mrs. Jard, I guess I wouldn’t want anybody telling me what to do, either. Then she thought of Mayhew. The old flatterer. She hadn’t been taken out to dinner in ever so long.
Slowly, she began to put on her stockings. She might as well get dressed and be ready to go out when the storm had passed.
He does have a way with him, she thought. Of course, she could never leave Mrs. Fred. It wouldn’t be right. But fancy being courted again. Because he was courting her, wasn’t he? She chuckled.
In the dimness of her alcove she went to the dresser, rummaged among her possessions, found what she wanted and, for the first time in a long time, she put on her great brassiere.
As she valiantly strapped herself into it, twisting, bending back and breathing hard, she suddenly paused and poked a finger at a little square piece of tape—that’s what it was—that had somehow turned up among her things. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine where it came from. When she picked it up she found a ring glued to one side of it.
Surely, she thought, that old fool...(she meant it tenderly, of course)...that old Mayhew...
Slowly she turned on the light. She had an idea that if she turned the electric button slowly the light, suddenly coming on, wouldn’t startle Mrs. Fred half as much as if she turned it fast. Close to the light, she examined the ring. It was a plain gold band. Inside was a sharply engraved “Doris” and a date.
I’ll be damned, thought Mrs. Jard.
There were probably many things that could be done about the ring. Mrs. Jard couldn’t think of any. She looked at it and tried to connect it with the people in the house. Dorry? Now, why would Dorry put it there! It didn’t make very much sense, did it? Mr. Mayhew, Mrs. Fred? She couldn’t see any reason why either of them would have it in the first place and would put it there in the second place. To put it frankly, Joe was the only one who might be up to funny business. Certainly not the others. But the more she thought about it, the more fantastic it seemed. It vaguely occurred to her to think of the time Joe had accused her of snooping in the girl’s room, but she did not know what to make of the idea. It troubled her and stuck in her mind but it did not contribute any sense.
Quickly she finished dressing. There are things that are better met when you are dressed.
At the first clap of thunder Dorry burrowed deeper into her pillow. She woke up enough to be conscious of being nude. But everybody in Tucson slept nude in summer. It was nice. She rolled over on her back and opened her eyes to make sure everything was all right. It was gray outside. It was raining now. It was hot and stuffy in the room. Her body was moist from throat to knees where it had pressed into the bedding, but it seemed to be drying fast. The wind was blowing, along with the rain and thunder. There had been several claps of thunder since the first one. As the wind suddenly blew into the room the moisture on her body felt freezing cold. She pulled up the bedspread and almost immediately felt warm and dry again. Puppy-nose dry. She spread her legs into the unwrinkled areas of the bed. It felt wonderful to stretch, to offer all of your body to the caressing weight of the quilted bedspread. But soon it became too hot under there. She was dry now, and when she threw back the spread the cool air, which now was punching freely into the room in long sustained gusts, felt good. She turned on her side so that her back would not become moist from lying flat on the bed. It was a wonderful storm. It seemed to relieve the tension that had been hovering, silent and stifling. The noise, the wind, the freshness filled the world. It smelled good, too. That is all there was, wind and noise and freshness. And rain and thunder and lightning.
Two rolls of thunder close upon each other, a violent increase in the rain and a shift in the wind that slapped a heavy spray of rain against the house made Dorry jump up. She was a little worried now. Her body gleaming, almost silvery in outline in the gray light, she ran around the room, closing the windows. Instantly the room felt hot again. She decided that the windows that opened onto the front porch did not have to be shut. As she opened them again a brutal blast of cold, wet wind hit her in the stomach and doubled her up. The curtains were blown, straight and flapping, into the room. Another spray of rain fired a volley against the panes. Water began to seep onto the window sills. Dorry decided that the storm was too much to cope with in the nude. Trying to keep track of what was happening at all the windows, she put on her dressing gown and wondered what the other people in the house were doing.
Mayhew was dressing. He had seen many a storm and he found them rather exhilarating. He wanted to see what this one was doing to his garden. He could watch it from the kitchen window. It was probably pretty bad. From what he could see from his own window, the yard was flooded with running rain. The mesquite tree in the far corner of the property was heaving wildly. The tall saguaro next to it was not budging an inch, but a flying length of rope wrapped around it by the storm was whipping frantically. The horizon was limited to a gray curtain of water a hundred yards away. It looked like a gale. Pursing his lips unconsciously, Mayhew put on his shirt.
There was a time, in uncharted seasons of uncounted years, when the earth of the desert thirstily drank the rains from the sky. Rivers of rain were stopped in their course and, spent, sank into the ground. Arroyos ran brimful and the channeled moisture, brisk and rushing, cut deeply into the soil it satisfied. Rains fell, spread briefly, and were greedily absorbed. Drenched bushes glistened in the clear light of after-storm; drip-drops clicked in the great silence, and the earth drank the rain where it fell until there was no more to drink. After a while it exhaled its moisture in puffy clouds from its revived green flesh, its sandy flanks and its muddy ravines. The desert steamed and brewed a million odors and wet animals shook themselves. But that was a long time ago.
Far out in the desert, where men had not had time to advance the sewers and the pavement, the earth still drank and breathed. But around the city the earth lay dead beneath the tar and the concrete and the brick. Where rain fell, it streamed uselessly along gutters, on hard pavement, swelling its rivulets into torrents that filled the streets from curb to curb, rolling over sidewalks, darting up driveways, sweeping away the gravel, looking for thirsty soil. Here and there some fell on dying lawns, on flowerbeds, on imprisoned trees. But how much could men’s gardens drink of the rushing waters! Far from where it fell the water rolled, filling the sewers, the man-made tunnels, the ill-placed homes. It gushed through town, flooding the stores, boiling over railroad tracks, coiling around buildings and docks and warehouses, a huge, swirling, menacing scourge looking for a place to spend itself, looking for the thirsty desert.
Mrs. Fred’s house had seen many storms. Rain-soaked and sun-dried in turn, its redwood shingles, curled and bleached and shrunken, clung precariously to rusted nails. Among the sleeker modern houses that surrounded it, it looked like a clumsy backroads rustic. It had weathered the storms of passing years with indifference, peeling a bit here, cracking a bit there, always strong enough to face the next season, always as strong as its owners.
It had been a wonderful house when it was built. Its straight, massive walls, its proud red shingles had seemed endowed with the life and the strength of the strong, proud Fredenhams who had created it of their own hands and thoughts. It had seemed active and alive, smoke curling from its chimney, vines and flowers creeping up its sides, lights moving behind its windows at night, dogs wildly playful or pointedly vigilant beneath its porch. But that was a long time ago.
Now, brittle and untended, it feebly protected the feeble old lady who lay, brittle and passive, unmindful of storms, on her narrow cot.
Mayhew saw the blast of wind and driven cloudburst that hit the corner of the house. From the
kitchen window he saw it sweep down the street, tearing branches from lacy pepper trees and jagged fronds from palm trees. He felt it hit the house and he saw chunks of the adobe wall fall upon his ruined garden. A moment later shingles swooped crazily into the yard.
Joe, pale, greasy, smelling of sleep, was at his elbow. Mayhew had time to think:...How dirty that boy is! before a second blast hit the corner of the house. Turning his head and looking up, so quickly that it hurt, he saw a jagged crack open up at the corner of the kitchen wall. It started at the ceiling on the back wall, slanted to the corner and, at right angle, split the side wall in a zigzag Y. Brown mud oozed through the crack, bubbling and spluttering.
Mayhew watched the cracked corner of the wall. It was behaving oddly. Joe tugged at his elbow and in the untried, rasping voice of fear, said:
“Is it bad?”
Mayhew impatiently shoved him aside and stared at the wing-shaped chunk of wall, high up in the corner of the kitchen. It was four feet along the crease of the corner, downward from the ceiling, and the wings were three to four feet wide. As he watched it, it seemed to drop a couple of inches, all in one piece. Now it was tilting slowly backward, and you could imagine the rain and the wind outside, eating away the weakened corner of the house and spewing it violently into the yard. The chunk of wall suddenly seemed to lose its support and began to topple over. It fell into the garden, leaving a gaping hole through which the storm brutally invaded the house. From where he stood, Mayhew could see the skeleton of the roof above the hole, and shingles clapping against the exposed beams as the wind swirled underneath them and wild rain splashed into the kitchen.
“Come on,” Mayhew shouted, “we have to...”
And he pointed to the roof as he struggled to open the kitchen door. Stupidly, his mouth ‘open, and shivering, Joe followed him out in the rain. In a second they were soaked. Flying twigs and gravel flayed them and the sharp needles of rain blinded them as the wind blew them cross-legged across the yard. Mayhew was shouting and waving his arm toward the shed. Joe followed him. He did not know what he was doing out there. In fact, he felt like a damn fool, and if it had anything to do with the house, Mayhew had a lot of goddamn guts getting him out in this lousy storm. Goddamning himself and everything else, he followed Mayhew across the drenched, storm-swept yard.
