Dog War

by Anthony C. Winkler

  She had not been in this splendid house three minutes and already she had insulted her interviewer by telling him that he was named after goat-balls soup, Precious reflected gloomily as she fielded his questions. The opportunity for employment was obviously lost, since Mannish would certainly not want a woman around him who every time she heard or spoke his name would immediately think of ramgoat testicles bobbing in a broth. And it was perhaps this stupid blunder that led her to throw caution to the winds and open up during the interview.

  She had felt bullied and put upon by the palatial driveway and grounds, and now as she sat in a kitchen so vast and ornate that its ceramic tiling flowed and silted between at least two corners—she had never before been in a kitchen to turn even one corner, much less two—she consciously decided to abandon sham and be her God-given self.

  So not even halfway in the interview, Precious seemed to visibly expand and swell, and before she knew it, she was even laughing in her inimitable way at some little witticism slyly offered by Mannish. And when she laughed as she did, virtually splattering her good humor throughout the lavish kitchen, Mannish was so startled that he suspended the questioning for a moment and peeped up at her with renewed interest.

  At one point, she even familiarly reached over and gave Mannish a sporting cuff on the ear, in the playful manner that Jamaicans who feel affection will genially swat an acquaintance in a bank lobby, and chuckled. For a brief instant Mannish thought he was getting his ears boxed by a Calcutta nun in primary school, but Precious was so obviously revelling in his humor that he broke down and managed at first a grin, then an outright smile, then a hearty treble laugh.

  The two of them laughed without inhibition in the ornate kitchen.

  Mannish regained control first, sniffed, and said, “My mother used to say that I was the least funny of all her seven children.”

  Precious scoffed and gave him another play-box on the ear.

  “Mothers are the last to know de truth about their children, you didn’t know that?”

  Mannish gingerly withdrew out of cuffing range lest she shatter his eardrum with a mistimed blow.

  An hour later he walked her to the front door and stood briefly with her surveying the grounds as they said goodbye.

  “This place is so wonderful,” Precious exclaimed, waving her hand at the landscaping splendor, “that even a dog would feel afraid to wee-wee on the grass.”

  Mannish chuckled. “The mistress has a beloved lapdog. And he wee-wees on this grass always. Those are his urination posts you see over there.” He pointed at the stumpy fire hydrants.

  Precious gaped and beamed at him with a mischievous air. “You joking again, right?”

  “I am very serious,” Mannish intoned grimly. “The mistress loves her dog, and when she thought he had no place suitable for alfresco urinating, she had workmen install those fake fire hydrants. She is very attached to her dog. Whoever takes this job will have to accompany Riccardo during his daily urinating promenades. It is part of the duties.”

  Precious shook her head emphatically. “Any dog I ever see trying to sneak a wee-wee on this lovely lawn, I’d kick all the way to Timbuktu.”

  Shaking hands with Mannish, she started her labored crunching down the driveway, leaving him standing before his mistress’s temple, chewing pensively on his lower lip.

  Chapter 11

  Precious got the job. Perhaps she shouldn’t have gotten the job, as things turned out, but she did get it, and for a time she was as sure as Revelations that it was the right thing to do. Nor would she learn, until many months later, that she had gotten the job over all the other applicants because in her spontaneous exuberance she had given Mannish a cuff or two on the ear and reminded him of maulings he had received from nuns at the parochial school of the childhood in India for which he was still dreadfully homesick.

  She shrieked when Mannish telephoned to say that she was the one, that the mistress was still away at her Riviera chateau but that it would be best if she began at once, thus affording him the opportunity to train her in her duties so she would be thoroughly familiar with the expectations of the position and the services required by the mistress once the mistress actually arrived some weeks later. If she would therefore please to take a taxi to the house and report in three days, he would be glad to embark on what little preliminary training she might require.

  When she hung up the telephone, Precious practically danced with sheer abandon and joy. Happily, the house was empty and no one was around to witness her extraordinary outburst. And after she had done with the grubby burst of ragamuffin shrieking, she trotted to her room and sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the photograph of Theophilus, who was still smiting the birdie with a hard-eye stare. Only Brutus had ever made her shriek with such wanton delight, she reflected ruefully, stroking Theophilus’s image through the cold glass. She missed him. She was momentarily happy but in the long run she still missed Theophilus and now, for some peculiar reason that she couldn’t explain, was dreadfully sorry that she had waited for him to be felled by death before she was willing to call game and ever-ready Brutus by his rightful name. It was such a small thing Theophilus had begged of her repeatedly, but she had stubbornly refused to do it. And yet honest Brutus used to unfailingly make her holler with delight at least once a week. Now she had nothing to holler about except for getting a job in a foreign land as a housekeeper and being separated because of it from the only people in America who loved her.

  So she was happy, but she was also sad. And as people do in her contrary and somewhat wayward position, she wept a little and smiled a little and when the momentary foolishness had passed, she washed her face and applied a fresh burst of makeup and went into the kitchen to prepare dinner for the family, which she served that night along with a helping of what she thought was wonderful news.

  The grandchildren did not think the news wonderful. Henry squirmed and thought it dreadful. Shirley was the only one who encouraged her mummy, for she fully understood a woman of independence and pluck wanting to establish herself in her own place and rule her own roost, be it only one room in the servant’s quarters.

  Cheryl-Lee flew to her side at the dinner table and begged Precious not to go since she’d only just come and who would she have to crawl under the bed and think with?

  “You still crawling under de bed to think, Mummy?” asked Shirley, with raised eyebrow.

  “Your father drove me to dat bad habit,” fudged Precious, convinced that Shirley would understand neither her childhood fear of heaven’s tin can nor her irregular conversations with Jamaican Jesus. Such inner secrets, Precious decided, were better kept from the police, even if the police happened to be one’s own daughter.

  Henrietta moaned that she would miss Grandma and did this mean that they would only see her once every five years as before, but Precious chuckled and said no, she would be living just around the corner and certainly would be coming by often to visit, and with that, she gave the two children a heartfelt hug.

  Henry fidgeted guiltily and cleared his throat and wondered why she had to leave when they were just getting used to having her around and he certainly did not want her to go, and Precious replied with an offhand air that when it was time to come it was time to come and when it was time to go it was time to go and this was her time to go, sounding like a dyslexic tea leaf reader.

  Shirley smirked and opined that Mummy was still young and attractive and in need of a man, which she certainly wouldn’t find stuck here in nuclear-family suburbia.

  “Your mother doesn’t need a man!” Henry scoffed. “What would she do with him?”

  “She would do plenty!” Shirley declared emphatically. As-for Precious, she only gave the snake-in-the-grass a withering look and added nothing further to the subject.

  Later that evening, as the family drifted into its customary nooks and crannies, Precious happened to encounter Henry in-the hall as both were trudging toward their respective bedrooms.

&nb
sp; “You don’t have to leave because of me, Precious,” he pleaded, his eyes darting up and down the hall to be sure that Shirley was not overhearing this exchange. “I’ll never come into your room again.”

  “I am not leaving because of you,” she said primly. “I am leaving because of me. It’s hard on a man like you to have a-woman like me around. I am just too attractive for my own-good.”

  “Yes, you are, Precious!” he breathed eagerly, edging closer. “You really are.”

  “And since I have no husband anymore,” she continued with a diffident wave of her hand, “yet I’m still basically a handsome woman with charm and poise, a man like you is bound to have his head turned.”

  “Yes, Precious!” he whimpered. “You turned my head. And I’m sorry I let you do it.”

  “You couldn’t help yourself,” she sighed heavily, conscious of bearing an unwanted burden of carnality. “But I’ll be leaving in a few days and you’ll be out of danger.”

  “I don’t want to be out of danger, Precious,” he begged, his eyes watering for her.

  “Dry you eye! Buck up and be a man,” she ordered, before he leaked eyewater over her frock. “Tomorrow, I’m going to church to pray hard and repent. Only the Lord knew what He had in mind when He put me in this position.”

  She would have given more suggestions, practical advice even about how he could, with hard work and application, make himself over into a man, but she had nothing to work with but a panty-rinsing husk, and the job, given the brief time left, would be simply impossible.

  She shrugged and headed toward her room. He paused at the end of the hall and whispered, “Precious?”

  “What?” she asked from her doorway, the hall stretching rigidly between them.

  “I forgive you.”

  “Thank you,” she said with an accepting nod.

  It was only after she was in her room, undressed and lying in bed, that she began feeling squeamish about the conversation she had had in the hall with the too-too wretch, which she thought had bordered on unseemly intimacy. Moreover, she really couldn’t believe that the brute had had the nerve to forgive her, as if she was the one that had puss-sneaked into his room to feel him up, and the more she thought about the gall of this man to forgive her the more she felt like tramping down the hall and dropping one good thump on the wretch in his sleep. She also found it hard to believe that she had had the nerve to admit to the too-too brute that she was still young and handsome, even though that was plainly obvious to the whole world. Really, what could have possessed her, she wondered, to hold such a slack conversation with him?

  Then she realized with a start that tonight was a Saturday night, the very night when Brutus duppy would most likely be prowling about her bed, whispering his week’s worth of pent-up nastiness into her unfenced earhole.

  “Brutus!” she hissed to the empty room. “Go ’way! You dead and gone!”

  And that night, for the first time since she had been in America, Precious wept with longing over Theophilus.

  Two days later she moved into the maid’s quarters of the Fort Lauderdale mansion and became its housekeeper.

  PART 2

  Chapter 12

  Since the days when cave-dwelling women first had to contend with bumptious stalagmites, every house has had the perverse desire to bully a new female occupant. If Precious had come to the mansion as its mistress rather than as its maid, she would have shown who was boss in the usual female way, by making mansion feel the whip of renovation and carpentry, the boot heel of paint-brush, the spur of shifted sofa and newly hung curtains. But coming as a lowly maid, she felt powerless and cowed when she crossed the mansion’s threshold carrying her two battered suitcases.

  As if revelling in advantage, the mansion greeted Precious with an arrogant sneer of wealth and comfort, baring twenty-two bedrooms, four drawing rooms, swimming pool that could land a seaplane, and bathrooms enough to empty every running stomach at a Boy Scout jamboree. It reeled off acres of wall, plastered thick with animal pictures, and endless hallways that swirled a creamy wash of ceramic tile into opulent rooms.

  Whirling inside her brain as Precious meekly followed Mannish on the tour throughout the mansion and gardens was a dust storm of schoolday modifiers such as “gargantuan,” “spacious,” “immense,” “massive,” and “colossal.”

  “You could keep a John Crow inside here,” Precious muttered, trying vainly to clear her brain of the flying debris of unruly adjectives as it strained to cope with the magnificence underfoot, “and he wouldn’t even know he was in a house.”

  “Oh, really,” said Mannish. “And what is a John Crow, if I-may ask?”

  “Dat what we call buzzard in Jamaica,” Precious said lamely, conscious that in her cowed state she was perilously close to misspeaking. “He could fly around inside all day and never miss de outdoors. But, of course,” she added to make it clear that she was no ornithological fool, “John Crow wouldn’t be happy inside without dead body to eat.”

  “It is a big house,” Mannish conceded coolly. “And although the mistress is an animal lover, as you can tell from these pictures on the walls, I do not believe she would consent to an interior buzzard.”

  “I only mean to say,” Precious stumbled, “dat de house big. It well big.”

  Her own quarters, discreetly in the rear of the mansion, consisted of a spacious bedroom furnished with a dresser and side tables with a telephone. Her sitting room sported a color television and a radio, her bathroom an enormous marble tub. Above her bed hung pictures of what Precious at first thought were rats, but Mannish said were mink.

  “I trust that you will be comfortable here,” Mannish murmured, discreetly leaving her to unpack and settle.

  A few minutes later she heard him drive away in the Rolls Royce.

  She unpacked and tentatively applied the whip to mansion rump. She stripped the pictures off the walls and stacked them neatly in a bottom drawer. Mink or no mink, they still resembled brown rat to her, and she would not stomach rat picture hanging over her head. She moved a chair from one corner to another and rearranged the sofa and side table in her sitting room. These were only tiny shifts, but they showed her as a woman accustomed to rulership over house.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed, catching her breath, when the phone on the table began to bark like a watchdog at a postman. Stupefied, Precious stared as it barked once, then twice, then a third time, before it dawned on her that the bark was a kind of demented American ring. She picked up the phone and timidly whispered, “Hello?” and an accented voice asked, “Is Mannish there, please?”

  Precious said he was not and the voice chuckled even though she’d said nothing funny and asked her please to tell Mannish that his cousin called. She replaced the receiver on the cradle and took an awed breath.

  “Me God! A barking phone. What will dey think of next?”

  When Mannish returned Precious mentioned the barking phone and the message from the cousin. Mannish explained that all the phones in the house were specially made to bark, some to “Bow wow,” others to “Woof woof” or “Arf arf.” Hers, as she had no doubt found out, was an “Arf arf” poodle phone. Precious wondered if she could throw a switch on the phone to remove the poodle and restore a normal ring, but Mannish said no, all the phones in the house were designed to bark.

  “All de phones bark?” Precious repeated.

  “Every one, without exception,” Mannish confirmed.

  “Phone not supposed to bark,” Jamaican Jesus warned in the back of her head.

  During her first days of mansion life Precious was as idle as a pickpocket among nudists.

  She had thought she would be working her fingers to the bone cleaning out mansion, but a maid service came in that very next morning and left every room sparkling and smelling like a freshly sprayed armpit. That same afternoon the yard work was done by a grinning Chinyman who rode his mower over the lawn, clipped the bushes, sprayed the roses, and edged the circular driveway. Wh
en he was finished the outdoors looked as though the Chinyman had shrink-wrapped it in cellophane. Later, two strapping young men with chemicals arrived and made the pool sparkle. Moreover, Precious soon discovered that with the mistress away not a soul visited the mansion. She did not even have to cook since all Mannish wanted to do every night for dinner was to drive out in the Rolls Royce and buy hamburgers.

  Mannish had nothing for her to do. He himself had nothing to do. Every morning he woke up at around 10 o’clock and pointed the satellite dish at the heavens and tapped into an Indian program, which he settled before the television to watch as he drank breakfast tea. When Precious asked him what she should do, he waved airily and said that she should get accustomed to the house and achieve peace of mind, for they were on holiday until the mistress and Riccardo returned. When the mistress returned Precious would have plenty to do, not to worry.

  But she could not help but worry, for without regular household duties she felt out of place like a puss at high tea.

  She wandered into the gardens to pick flowers and felt foreign. She sat on the edge of the furry lawn abutting the intracoastal canal and felt alien. People riding past in motorboats and yachts stared at her and made her feel peculiar. Sitting on the deck around the pool, she felt as unwelcome as urban bullfrog. She would drift back into the house, hoping to chat with Mannish, to find him engrossed in his Indian program where everyone spoke incomprehensible Coolie. She would sometimes sit down nearby and watch, but the sound of nothing but Coolie talk soon made her feel so queasy that she would have to retire to the bathroom.

  But the bathroom awed her. The living room cowed her. The kitchen humbled her. The barking phones made her heart jump. And everywhere she stepped, animal pictures gawked at her from the walls.

  Three days this bullying went on, with mansion doing its best to prove that it was the belly and she the tapeworm.

  Precious began retreating under her bed to think.