Minute Maids

by Rachel Caine

  Lark was asleep, feet up on his threadbare footstool. The TV blared out wailing sirens and screams. She turned it down and went to her own chair, where she picked up her Bible and began to read her Sunday School assignment.

  Deacon George had always taught the adult class. She wondered who'd teach it this week.

  She looked at the flickering blue TV again, over the top of her glasses, and turned up her reading light a little to concentrate on the Lord's words.

  * * *

  The keys to Deacon George's house had come from his sister, Charity Graham Warriner, who lived out in Greenfield and never visited town unless she had to. Charity had married money and society, and didn't like to be reminded she came from poor folk just like most everybody else in the county. Folks said she and George had never got along, but Olida had never heard anybody say why. Money, maybe. Charity had a lot of money and Lord, didn't it make people crazy.

  The Deacon sure had a whole lot of keys. Most everybody had a key lock in the doorknob, and that was considered sufficient by everybody in town except banks. Deacon George had three locks, one in the doorknob and two deadbolts.

  "Hey, check that out. What's he got to lock up like that, you think?" Rita-Mae asked.

  "None of your business," Olida snapped. Rita-Mae made a funny little O with her mouth. It showed off teeth that would have been better covered up.

  "You gonna let her talk to me like that?" the white girl asked Zenobia. Zenobia shrugged cheerfully. She was checking her watch, probably figuring out when she had to pick up her kids again. Zenobia never cared about other people's peculiarities.

  Rita-Mae's eyes, on the other hand, lit up. She kept staring at the keys.

  "Had to be something to make that guy break in here, don't you think so, Olida? Something good. Maybe he's got money hidden away in there." Rita-Mae sounded convinced, but then she was the kind of silly woman who got convinced by those newspapers in the checkout line, and by men who said they still loved her after they gave her black eyes.

  Olida ignored her.

  She got the first lock open and studied the other two keys. She guessed right the first time, and slid the second lock back. The other deadbolt was harder to turn, and she felt the strain in her wrist before it finally clicked back. The door swung open without even a creak, and the other two women looked at Olida. A whiff of something evil-smelling blew out at them with the warm air from inside.

  "After you," Rita-Mae said, and grinned.

  Olida squared her shoulders and carried the first crate of cleaning things inside. She set it against the heavy door to keep it open while they unloaded.

  The house sure had the smell. Olida had only gone three steps into the entry hall when she saw the cause of it.

  Rita-Mae stopped beside her and shifted her carrying case to her other hip. They stood in reverent silence.

  "Ooh, I hate it when that happens," Rita-Mae said. Zenobia leaned over her shoulder to look.

  "I've seen worse," she said. Rita-Mae rolled her eyes.

  "Yeah, I'll bet your kids make a real mess."

  "Look, you gringa -- "

  "We'll start with the brains," Olida interrupted. "Get me a broom."

  The brains were mostly stuck up in the spackles on the ceiling, little dried gray clumps like old spilled pudding. Rita-Mae handed Olida the broom and stepped back, all the way to the door. Zenobia stayed where she was, squinting up at the ceiling.

  "What are you lookin' at?" Olida asked her. Zenobia shrugged.

  "How you get brains all the way up there?" she asked. Olida set the broom butt-end down on the floor and looked. The blood splash started about five feet up on the wall and crawled all the way on up to the ceiling, where strings and clots of brain hung like those stalactite-things in caves Olida had seen on in schoolbooks.

  "Practice?" Rita-Mae said helpfully from the corner.

  "Shotgun under the chin," Olida sighed. "Seen it before. Don't recall seein' it done this well before -- mostly they just take they faces off when they get scared at the last minute."

  "Ain't that a bitch," Rita-Mae marveled. "Then you're depressed and ugly."

  "You're disgusting." Zenobia threw a pair of gloves at the white woman. Rita-Mae grinned and snapped them on, just like she'd probably seen it done on TV. Olida lifted the broom again. "Wait! I borrow these from my son!"

  Zenobia held out a faded brown scarf and some and an old cracked swimming mask. Olida tied the cloth over her hair and pulled the mask on. Zenobia and Rita-Mae laughed at her, but got out of the way.

  "What the hell does your son do with this?" she asked. Zenobia shrugged.

  "The usual."

  Olida decided not to ask. She swiped the broom across the ceiling.

  It rained brains. Zenobia and Rita-Mae stood out of range and made jokes Olida didn't hear; keeping her arms over her head made her feel tired and sick again, but she kept sweeping at the ceiling while spackles and brains pattered down. She tried to breathe through her nose.

  "Clear?" she asked. Zenobia came back to take a look.

  "Looks good. Just the blood now."

  Olida sighed and stripped the mask off. The brown scarf had things on it; she shook it off and handed it back. Zenobia tossed it in the trash sack.

  Olida handed the broom to Rita-Mae, who looked sour but started sweeping up. It didn't take long.

  One little bag of dusty brain.

  "I'm tired," Rita-Mae announced, as she always did. Olida handed her a bucket and pointed to the bathroom across the hall. "Why do I have to do all the hard stuff?"

  "'Cause you're a hard woman," Zenobia said with a smile. "Catch."

  She threw a bottle of Pine-Sol at her. Rita-Mae caught it one-handed and did what Olida guessed was an end-zone victory dance in the doorway.

  "Fool," Olida muttered, and drug the last crate of supplies away from the door. It swung shut with a hollow click. "Don't know why I put up with all this foolishness."

  "Catch," Zenobia said, and Olida straightened up to grab a flying paid of gloves out of the air.

  She was too old to do a victory dance, she decided. She just put on her best dignified look.

  Zenobia laughed.

  "Ain't there no air conditioner in here?" Rita-Mae yelled from the bathroom. The water was still running.

  "We ain't supposed to run it," Olida yelled back.

  "Well, how do you like that, we're bustin' our asses to clean up his mess and we're not supposed to be comfortable while we do it? Who the hell said that?"

  "I did."

  "Oh." Rita-Mae mumbled something Olida couldn't make out over the rushing water. The tap shut off with a high-pitched shriek, and the white woman carried a sloshing, steaming bucket out into the hall and thumped it down on the hardwood floor. "Here. Knock yourself out."

  Zenobia elbowed her out of the way to dunk a mop in the bucket. She wrung it out and handed it to Rita with a grin.

  Olida broke up the fight.

  When it was quiet again, except for the muttering, she unfolded the ladder and climbed up to scrub at the blood on the ceiling. The plaster crumbled and rained down in her eyes, and even though she kept scrubbing it didn't look too good to her. It was hot up near the ceiling, and the smell was as thick as fog. She left it to dry as she started on the bloodstains on the wall. Zenobia tossed her up a fresh sponge when the first one got too ragged.

  "Hey, 'Lida?" Zenobia called up. Olida looked down and clutched at the metal ladder tighter. Zenobia looked even shorter and fatter from this high.

  "What?"

  "Where's Rita?"

  Olida said a word that would get her in trouble in Sunday School, and climbed down the ladder. She felt better having her feet on the ground again.

  "Rita!" she yelled. A toilet flushed across the hall. "Rita!"

  "Keep your pants on! I had to pee!"

  "You gotta do anything except work!" Zenobia shouted. The bathroom door banged open, and Rita glared at her.

  "Mop," Olida said firmly.
"Don't mope."

  Rita-Mae did both.

  It was Zenobia's turn on the wall. Olida sat down on the bottom rung of the ladder to hold it in place. It shook and shimmied with Zenobia's scrubbing.

  "Smells bad, don't it?" Zenobia called down. Olida found herself nodding. The whole place smelled bad, like old rotten trash. She wondered if maybe that wasn't it, that there was bad garbage in the kitchen that nobody had bothered to take out. It would be a nice thing to do, to take out the garbage, even though they weren't being paid for that.

  "Smells more like the toilet's backed up somewhere," Rita-Mae said from across the way. She was slowly pushing the mop across some muddy footprints.

  "Why don't you go find out?" Zenobia grunted. She tossed a sponge down to Olida, who dunked it in the pail and tossed it back up. They needed new sponges. These were falling apart quick.

  "I ain't no plumber. Let him fix it, he's a handyman."

  Rita-Mae had a real heart of gold, Olida thought. Only problem was, she'd pawned it on her fourteenth birthday about the same time she'd got knocked up with her first kid.

  "Finish your mopping," Olida told her. Rita shrugged.

  "Mopping, hell, make her get up here," Zenobia grunted as she swiped a sponge across thick blood and rose-colored water ran down like new wounds. "Hey, does this look pink to you?"

  She pointed to a place she'd already cleaned. Olida got her flashlight from the heap in the hallway and squinted at the spot.

  "'Fraid so."

  Zenobia sighed.

  "We got a problem. It's gonna have to all be repainted to get rid of the stains -- it's old paint, or somebody put flat instead of glossy. Won't come clean all the way like this."

  "Well, we weren't hired as no painters, just to clean. If it's still pink I guess the church can come out and paint it for him." Olida didn't like leaving things half-done, but there wasn't any sense in making more work for themselves than they'd been paid for. Zenobia, just as proud, looked unhappy.

  "But Olida -- "

  "You just come on down, let that dry off. We'll get this blood off the floor."

  The floor was warped hardwood. The blood looked like old rusty caulking between the boards. Olida picked through the supply cases and found old toothbrushes. Zenobia, climbing heavily down the ladder, muttered and said something in Spanish.

  "What?" Olida asked. The ladder groaned as Zenobia took the last step off of it.

  "I say you drive me crazy, you and these toothbrushes."

  Olida grinned and threw a soapy sponge at her.

  The two of them scrubbed on their hands and knees in companionable silence. The sponges turned rusty, rinsed clean in the buckets. The water in the buckets turned red.

  "Lark called Antonio this morning," Zenobia said. "After you left. Told Antonio we shouldn't be doing this."

  "Cleaning?" Olida sat back on her heels and frowned at her.

  "No, no, be here at the Deacon's house."

  "Lark's an old fool," Olida snapped. "Old age is makin' him crazy."

  "Antonio said Lark was really worried. He wants me to call him before we leave."

  Olida grunted in disgust and dunked her sponge. The soap bubbles floating on the water turned pink, like Easter eggs.

  "Old fool. I'll call him when I'm good and ready."

  "Sure. Oh, remember, I got to pick up Laura at three and take her to dance class."

  She said it the funny way Mexicans did -- La-oo-ra. Olida tried to remember which one La-oo-ra was, and finally figured it must be the younger girl, the tall one with long legs.

  "How's Carmen?" Olida asked. She hadn't heard much about the oldest, Carmen, since she'd dropped out of school. Zenobia kept her head down, kept working. Her shoulders bunched up tight under her T-shirt.

  "Okay, I guess. You know."

  Olida grunted. After a while, Zenobia looked at her.

  "You hear from LaVelle?"

  It had been a long time since Olida had heard anybody say the name, even herself. She and Lark didn't talk about LaVelle, had given up trying to find her.

  "Naw," Olida said. Her sponge made a whispering sound over wood. "She ain't gonna come back. She's gone."

  "Carmen's gone too. Just run off with that no-good boy. How they think they can live -- " Zenobia blinked back tears and went back to scrubbing. "She call me from Kansas City. Say she got a job as a waitress."

  Olida thought about LaVelle. She'd always wondered where the girl was, what she was doing. Waitressing would be good for her. The girl needed to learn to take orders.

  "What's Antonio say about it?"

  "You know. Nothing. What can he say?"

  Lark had said plenty, none of it good. But in the end it had been LaVelle, nobody else, who'd had the last word.

  Goodbye, she'd said.

  Olida scrubbed.

  The blood came up, and there was only a little stain left on the wood. It could have been anything, a water stain, a spilled soft drink. Good enough. Olida wetted down a toothbrush and started scrubbing in the cracks. Zenobia sat back on her heels to stretch.

  It took Olida a minute to realize she couldn't hear Rita-Mae fussing around. She sat up and looked around.

  No Rita in sight. The bathroom door was open, so she wasn't in there pretending to be on the pot. Zenobia looked around, too, and made a face.

  "Can't count on nobody these days," she sighed. Olida grunted as she got to her feet.

  "Damn woman. I'll find her."

  "Okay," the Mexican woman shrugged. "Hey, before you go, you want me to look in the closet for stains?"

  She pointed to the door a few feet away.

  "Go on," Olida nodded; they'd both seen blood end up in stranger places. Zenobia, still on her knees, shuffled over to the door and swung it open.

  The coat closet was full of shoes. They spilled out on the floor in front of her.

  Hundreds of shoes. Olida opened her mouth to say something and then shut it. Zenobia reached out to stir through the pile.

  "Something we don't know about the Deacon?" Zenobia asked. Olida reached in and pulled out a tennis shoe. It was about the size a girl of ten would wear, decorated with beads and ribbons that the girl had probably glued on herself. It didn't look store-bought.

  No laces in the shoe, but girls did that these days, thought that tripping over their own feet made them cool.

  There were so many shoes. Mens, womens, girls, boys.

  Zenobia dug in the pile, fascinated.

  "You think he buy them at garage sales?" she asked as she held up a man's black dress shoe, worn at the heel, missing its laces.

  "I don't know. Maybe he was collecting them to give to missionaries." That made Olida feel better, a warm glow where her stomach had twisted all up. "You know, people send clothes and such."

  "He send shoes with no shoelaces?" Zenobia held up the one she held.

  "Some of them -- "

  "None of them. Look," she said, and pointed to the rows she had set out. There were thirteen pairs of tennis shoes, six pairs of men's dress shoes. No shoelaces.

  "Well -- " Olida searched for an answer and didn't find one. She shrugged. "It's his business, I guess. Put them back."

  "But -- "

  "But nothin', it ain't our business. Put them back."

  Zenobia, frowning, stacked them back in the closet. Olida caught herself staring.

  Shoes. If he was collecting for the church, why hadn't he sent them on to the missionaries? Why shut them up in the closet?

  "Olida!"

  Rita-Mae, finally. What the hell had she got into? Olida took a step or two down the hall. Rita's voice sounded hollow and quiet.

  "Where are you?" Olida called. "Girl, you better get out here and -"

  "I'm in the kitchen."

  Leave it to a white girl to find someplace to poke around instead of doing the work she was paid for. Olida shook her head and went down the long narrow hall. At the end were two doors, one into a faded-looking sitting room, the other into the kitch
en.

  The smell almost made her gag. She took a deep breath and held it while she walked on in.

  Rita-Mae was standing in the center of the kitchen, facing a pile of things on the floor.

  "What the hell -- " Olida stopped dead in her tracks and stared, too. "Why'd you do make a mess like that?"

  "I didn't," Rita-Mae said. It sounded like a wail. "It was like this."

  Can openers. Spoons. Forks. Butter knives. Soup ladles. Every single kitchen thing Olida could name was piled in a heap on the floor. She nudged it with a foot. A cockroach as big as her finger ran out from underneath, and she and Rita-Mae both jumped back.

  "See?" Rita-Mae sounded hysterical. "See? It ain't right."

  Olida had to admit the truth of that. She went over to one of the drawers that should have held silverware and pulled it open.

  The drawer was lined in red velvet. On it, screwdrivers lay in neat, even rows.

  Phillips-heads in different sizes. Flat heads. Ratchet sets.

  The next one had hammers. Big claw-headed hammers, gleaming like new. Small delicate hammers. Ball peen hammers.

  The next had hacksaws, five different kinds, as clean as if he'd never used them.

  She moved over to a drawer next to the sink. Electric drills and drill bits.

  "Olida?" Rita-Mae asked behind her. She sounded faint and scared. "Olida, there's something wrong."

  "Ain't none of our business what a man wants to do in his own house," Olida said. She sounded a lot more sure about it than she felt.

  One side of the sink was full. Murky. It smelled awful.

  The other side was full of what looked like gravel, the kind people put in fishtanks.

  She didn't want to see no more. She backed away and almost stumbled over the pile of kitchen utensils. A rusty-looking cheese grater slid under her foot like a skate.

  Rita-Mae's face was blank. Her eyes looked wide and scared.

  "Ain't none of our business," Olida said again in her best I'm-in-charge-here voice, and Rita-Mae blinked and nodded. "Come and help us finish up in the hall, and we'll go home."

  Rita-Mae was glad to go but went slowly, and kept her head turned over her shoulder all the way down the hall.

  "What you lookin' at?" Olida growled. Rita-Mae's shoulders pulled up in what might have been a shrug if they'd ever relaxed again.