Dog War

by Anthony C. Winkler

She was hiding there on this third evening, asking herself what she could do to keep from being cowed by mansion, when it struck her that what she needed was a cobweb.

  To find and clean out a cobweb would prove that mansion was human with a dirty batty. She felt giddy at the prospect of the wiping that must surely follow.

  But where would she find a cobweb inside a sparkling mansion? She squirted out from under the bed and set out on a cobweb hunt.

  Through twenty-one of the twenty-two bedrooms she stalked, searching diligently for a cobweb. From room to room she went, crouching under bed and looking behind toilet. There was no cobweb to be found. Finally, she came to the last unsearched room and found the door mysteriously bolted.

  Disappointed, she slunk back into the cavernous drawing room to find Mannish curled up in a stupor on the couch, still watching Indian program.

  Returning to her room, Precious briefly considered smuggling a cobweb from Shirley’s house before deciding that a CIA cobweb would not give the satisfaction of one directly from mansion’s own nasty batty.

  Her head aswirl with thoughts and schemes, she then did what any Christian woman in her position would do: She said a prayer asking Jesus (the Jamaican) please to deliver unto her a cobweb.

  And Jesus heard.

  For within the hour, as she was preparing to brush her teeth, she spotted a minuscule cobweb dangling from the toilet lockoff valve near the floor.

  With a noisy hallelujah, she jumped up, pulled on her bathrobe, and rushed into the living room to find Mannish dozing on the couch. She roused him indignantly, announcing that she wished him to witness what nastiness she had found in her bathroom, and the poor Indian chauffeur, groggy after hours of watching television, shambled after her into the bathroom, where he stared with thickening stupefaction as she-pointed to a frail strand of glossy cobweb dangling from the lock-off valve seconds before attacking it with domestic viciousness.

  Mannish peered at her as she wiped triumphantly, and after a long embarrassing pause during which he recalled the name of the continent his foot presently walked on, he finally summoned up the presence of mind to mutter respectfully, “You are the cleanest woman I have ever met in my entire life.”

  Precious slept that night the refreshing sleep of the innocent. And when she awoke next morning, she was impossibly pleased with herself.

  Mansion had a dirty batty; she had wiped it.

  Her rulership was now established.

  But there was still nothing to do. She began to seriously wonder why she had been hired. Then it hit her. A man who would employ a woman for $250 a week with all found and give her nothing to do could only be out for one thing. One night she would wake up out of a deep sleep to find the Indian wriggling naked atop her slumbering belly, bawling for moonlight pumpum.

  Naturally she would thump him down and chuck him straight out the door.

  She pondered further. If only Mannish were not a sneaky Coolie, she would certainly find him attractive. But she would never forget how a Coolie boy with whom she had been playing the fishing-in-drawers game had once dropped a sand crab down her panties. The crab had seized the rim of her pumpum with its claw, and Precious had had to hurriedly rip off her panties before the beast mistook itself and went scuttling down the wrong hide-out hole, exposing her to medical mortification before the village nurse.

  Now that it was clearer to her why she had been hired, she felt considerably better. She looked forward to the moment when moody Mannish would make his move so she could box his face, clear the air between them, and set events into motion. Night after night as she settled into her bed with a sigh, she could even feel the tingle in her palm from smiting Coolie cheek. Some nights she even lay in bed and practiced boxing down a Coolie on the tiled floor.

  But after the third week when he failed to make his move, Precious became testy and quarrelsome, wondering again what she had done to earn the lovely room with a private bath in the back of the house, and if the brute had gone to all this trouble just for a little pum-pum, why he wasn’t man enough to come and beg for it honorably instead of sneaking around like a chartered accountant?

  If it was one thing Precious couldn’t stand, it was man circling her like crow, especially after getting used to forthright Brutus who, during his frisky years, would sometimes vulgarly jump right out of his tent flap like he was at a Revival meeting. But Mannish made no move and did not come creeping into her bedroom at night, and during daylight hours was as polite as church usher during collection. All he did was watch television and gobble down hamburgers. All she did was loll about the house, doing a little occasional feather-dusting and fixing the odd sandwich. And nearly every night she phoned up Shirley and the grandchildren and pretended to be busy and happy with mansion life, while all along she was wondering what on earth she was doing to earn her money.

  She did savor a quiet satisfaction, however, from inviting Shirley and the family to visit her at the mansion, with Mannish’s permission, and one Sunday afternoon they arrived when the chauffeur was discreetly away, and she drew respectful “Oohs” and “Aahs” out of them as she led them on a tour through the household splendor. Shirley asked question after question, pawed brocade fabric and felt up crystal bauble, while the two children were so impressed with the barking phones that they suspended their usual monkeyshines and acted as if they were in a museum.

  “This is America for you, Mummy!” Shirley marvelled in a hushed voice. “Only four months in America, and already you living in a mansion complete with swimming pool and barking phone!”

  “She’s only the maid, Shirley,” Henry grumbled, shuffling surlily behind them.

  “Shut up about maid!” Shirley snapped at him over her shoulder. “She still living in a mansion! Where your mansion?”

  “I am not a maid,” Precious corrected Henry primly. “My title is factotum.”

  “See!” Shirley crowed. “She’s factotum, not maid. Congratulations, you hear, Mummy! I knew you would do well in America.”

  And she waved her hand with a lavish sweep that deposited all the mansion glory that unfolded around them at her mummy’s immigrant feet. Precious beamed with inexpressible pleasure.

  After the family had gone home, Precious retreated wearily into her own rooms to savor the glow of melting-pot triumph. Theophilus glowered disapprovingly at her from the dresser, and since there was a chance sneaky Mannish might come tiptoeing into her room tonight, Precious thought it best to spare her dead husband the trauma of witnessing Coolie romancing.

  She turned his portrait gently so Theophilus could glower to his heart’s content at the wall and went to bed wondering if tonight was the night she would wake up to find a Coolie eelet wriggling atop her bellybutton.

  Then suddenly the holiday was over, and nearly four weeks of getting fat in a mansion crashed to an abrupt end.

  One evening she suddenly found that all traces of meat had mysteriously disappeared from the refrigerator and the pantry, which now bulged sanctimoniously with cheese, beans, yogurt, and green leafy vegetables. She went looking for Mannish and found him before the television, gourmandizing a giant hamburger. When she asked him, pray, what happened to the ham in the refrigerator, Mannish sheepishly explained that the mistress was a vegetarian who went berserk at the sight of meat, and that he was enjoying his last hamburger since she was returning tomorrow in her private jet and until she left would starve him on nothing but beans and cheese and dairy products.

  “I always become constipated on such a diet,” he said gloomily. Then, waving the hamburger defiantly, he added, “This is possibly my last dead cow on the premises for two or three months.”

  “Dead cow?”

  “That is what the mistress calls hamburgers,” he said grumpily, chomping shamelessly on the carcass wedged in a sesame seed bun. Precious reflected inwardly that if a woman wanted to call a hamburger a dead cow, that was her prerogative no matter what any carping Coolie said. What she found utterly baffling was that the mistres
s would be arriving in her own personal jet plane without media coverage. You would think that such a wonder would merit at least as much attention as a mass murder.

  Wiping his mouth, Mannish interrupted her daydream by saying that he hoped everything was spick and span for the mistress’s arrival. Precious assured him that everything was most certainly spick and span.

  To prove it to him, she led him through the house, pointing out spickness and spanness. He nodded and sniffed and looked pleased and rubbed his hands together like he was nervous, and Precious got the impression he was dying to tell her something.

  They ended up in the drawing room where Mannish poured her a glass of wine and sank down to his elbows in a plush couch.

  “Precious,” he began somberly, “now we must earn our salary. And there is something about the mistress that I must tell you.”

  His manner was so glum that Precious braced herself for news about syphilis, goiter, hunchback, or hideous deformity.

  “You must understand, Precious,” he said crisply, “that Americans are not like we immigrants. It happens that they have everything while our own countries have nothing.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Precious interrupted stiffly, her patriotism aroused. “Maybe where you come from you have nothing but holy cow, but Jamaica—”

  Mannish cut her off impatiently. “Your Jamaica does not have everything. My India does not have everything. Here, in this house, in this country, the people are used to having everything. This is what makes them eccentric.”

  Precious felt her argumentative dander rising at this forward Coolie presuming to lecture her about her own country. But Mannish raised his hand like a bishop and squashed her with an upheld palm. “I will show you what I mean,” he said decisively. “Please follow me without questioning.”

  He trotted down the warren of corridors until he came to the one room whose door had remained closed ever since Precious had been in the mansion.

  Pausing until she was right at his side, he unlocked the door and turned on the light to reveal a spacious bedroom with an enormous king-size bed, a room that first seemed to Precious, whose eyes were now hardened to mansion splendors, no better than others of its brethren on either side of the corridor, when her darting gaze was drawn irresistibly to a bizarre assemblage of paintings and pictures hanging on the wall.

  The bottom half of one wall was thick with pictures of fire hydrants, tree trunks, street signs, country stumps, and construction posts. Most peculiarly, all the pictures and paintings were hung at nearly ground level, no higher than three feet from the floor, while the upper stretches of the walls were conspicuously bare.

  Precious’s chin had dropped down to her neck bone. Her mouth gaped and her stupefied tongue briefly and visibly wallowed. Mannish observed her reaction and looked pleased. “This,” he announced with triumph, “is Riccardo’s bedroom. These are his favorite pictures. Please. Just observe while I finish my point.”

  He opened the bathroom door to reveal, to a gasp of astonishment from Precious, that the shower stall had been converted to a sandbox in which was planted, with ominous perpendicularity that spoke volumes about spendthrift carpentry and misguided plumbing, a fire hydrant.

  “And this,” Mannish said smoothly, “is Riccardo’s bathroom. This is his indoor hydrant.”

  “A dog live in dis room?” Precious whispered, stepping slowly through the room as if she was treading atop a fresh grave.

  “Yes,” Mannish replied. He whipped off the bedspread to reveal a custom-fitted sheet gaily imprinted with endless patterns of bones. “And he prefers his cotton sheets to be changed every day.”

  “Changed every day?” Precious echoed dimly, moving across the room to gape at the bone pictures. “Den, pray tell me, who is de dog maid in charge of changing bone sheet every day?”

  Mannish peered hard at her, his sanded cheek darting with a noiseless, guilty twitch.

  Revelation burst on Precious’s senses like a thunderclap.

  “You brute,” she gasped accusingly, “is not pum-pum you hire me for! Is dog maid!”

  Chapter 13

  The mistress came home late that night, threw a harried glance at Precious who was wedged in a corner timidly awaiting her, and groaned that she couldn’t cope.

  “A new maid, Mannish!” she shrieked piteously. “I can’t cope with this tonight. I just can’t cope!”

  Riccardo trotted in behind the mistress and, glancing at Precious, bared his teeth and gave a menacing growl that she understood to be Dog for he couldn’t cope, either.

  “Mannish,” the mistress commanded before flouncing into her room, “Riccardo sleeps in his own room tonight. That dog kicks too much in his sleep. Last night he nearly kicked me out of my own bed.”

  Then she was gone, leaving Mannish burbling after her a soothing, “Very good, ma’am.”

  The Indian led Riccardo down the hall, opened the bedroom door, and escorted him inside while Precious stared with astonishment from her post in the corner. At the door the dog turned and shot a smutty glance at Precious from two feet off the ground where dog eye beaded and rolled in egg-white sockets of dog head, and the only other human being she could remember ever giving her such a nasty look was a slack parson on her wedding day.

  Mannish padded back out of the room, closing the door quietly after him.

  “That is all for tonight, Precious,” he said suavely, coming over to where she stood gaping like she was painted on a mummy shell. “See? Was that so bad?”

  “The dog kicks?” Precious asked, following the Indian down the hallway into the living room, which seemed to her to have suddenly and inexplicably shrunk with the arrival of the mistress.

  “This is America, Precious,” Mannish assured her smoothly, patting her on the arm. “Sometimes dogs kick in America.”

  “In Jamaica only donkey and mule kick,” Precious mumbled, feeling stupid.

  “Indeed so. That is another difference between the two cultures. It is as I explained last night.”

  Last night.

  Last night there had been trauma, scene, and serious domestic brouhaha. When she had found out that she had been hired as dog maid, Precious had carried on and made something of an unladylike stink, especially since she had convinced herself that the sneaky Indian had hired her for pum-pum. Mannish did not know what pum-pum was and Precious had had to clumsily enlighten him, using gestures and euphemisms and biblical phrases such as when a man “knew a woman” like Solomon and David and other patriarchs had known thousands of earthly concubines before going off to heaven to have knowledge of the female angel legions. Mannish still did not get what Precious thought she had been hired for, forcing her to grope for metaphor and simile until he finally saw the light. Of course, he assured her quickly when he grasped her meaning, that was also definitely on his mind when he had selected her, and upon hearing this snide confession, Precious slapped his pudgy cheek with a sharp box for making her wait a whole unrequited month to be awakened by a naked Coolie wriggling atop her slumbering belly.

  He took the blow, winced, and bowed. “Of course,” he said humbly, “I deserve that slap. It was definitely your body I was after. I am so sorry.”

  “You liar!” Precious screamed. “Is dog maid you wanted! Well, if you think for a minute that this woman is going to be maid to some mangy dog-.-.-.”

  “I assure you, Precious,” Mannish said gravely, “the dog has no mange.”

  Precious was not pacified.

  “Giving dog a room with bone picture hanging off de wall and fire hydrant in de bathroom!” she shrieked. “What kind of sick mind would do such a thing?”

  “Not an Indian mind, Precious. It is an American mind. Indians do not worship dog. It is here in America that they think that the dog is god. Indeed, ‘Dog’ spelled backward in American is ‘God.’”

  Precious had never considered this point before, and although her rage was still bubbling, she was momentarily floored by this profound observation.

/>   Mannish had taken advantage of the lull to lead her back-into the living room and ply her with another glass of wine-while he explained that he had not meant to mislead her,-that from the start he had been drawn to her obvious voluptuousness-.-.-.

  “You want another box?” Precious asked belligerently.

  Certainly not. That was the last thing he wanted on this earth. What he most desperately wanted was for Precious to stay on the job and not walk out as she had seemed poised to do a moment ago. The mistress owned five houses in three countries. She stayed here with Riccardo only a few months out of the year. Sometimes she was gone for three, four months, during which there would be nothing for them to do but enjoy the luxury, to live in the house as if it were their own, and all Precious would be required to do for the short time the mistress was in residence was to take care of Riccardo, who was at heart a good dog, seldom bad-tempered or surly.

  Precious stared stonily at him while he babbled explanations and begged her to stay. Of course, he did not know that she had to stay, that she simply couldn’t return to Shirley’s house. He could not know, moreover, that mansion living was beginning to sweet Precious down to the bone; that already she had grown to love the way eyes peered enviously at her as she stepped with a flourish through mansion gate, walking with the proprietary tread of a woman who regularly skimmed fashion magazine on mansion toilet; that Shirley’s praise of her accomplishments had gone to her head; that she was prepared to fight to keep her foot in mansion door. But she still pretended that her mind was set in cement and that she was leaving.

  In the face of her apparent obstinacy, Mannish got agitated and performed a jerky orbit around the spacious drawing room. He stopped after his third revolution, peered down at Precious, and begged her to stay and save him from arrest for cannibalizing the dog.

  Precious nearly jumped out of her skin with terror. “Say what?”

  He was on his knees, begging, his black eyes rolling in a bed of angst and fury.

  “Precious,” he gasped, “if you leave, I will kill that dog and-curry him. I know that I will do this horrible thing because I almost did it once. I hate that dog so very much that I want desperately to cook and eat him.”