The Spectator Bird (8 page)

Streaming water off my slicker, my beret soaked, I brought in wood and laid a fire. With chicken breasts amandine for the main course, I decided to evoke Césare's appreciation with a good Green Hungarian, and put two bottles in to chill. To give a running start to Minnie, who was due at nine, I emptied all the wastebaskets and the garbage pail. When she didn't show up by nine, I went in and made the bed. Then I cleared some coat space in the front hall closet, and when my householder's eye was of. fended by the clutter of canes, umbrellas, and walking shoes stacked in there, I cleaned out the closet

Nine-thirty, and no Minnie. Ruth, browning something in butter, compressed her lips and worked her black eyebrows at me significantly. “I thought maybe she could help with the cooking and serving,” she said. “If she doesn't show up pretty soon the won't even have the house tidied up.”

I started washing up her pots and pans, which she redirtied as fast as I washed them. By ten I had caught up with her, and the kitchen was filling with succulent smells, but still no Minnie. “She may not get here at all,” I said. “There may be mud slides, washouts, down trees, all sorts of things. Maybe I'd better do the vacuuming. Then you can put her to work right away if she comes.”

“Oh, if you would,” Ruth said gratefully. Reaching to move something off the burner, she burned her wrist. Grinning with pain, she held still while I smeared the inch-long burn with ointment which I, suburban preparedness freak, had stowed in a drawer only days before.

The more any situation looks to Ruth like darkest tragedy, the more I am inclined to believe it can be dealt with. My contrariness, I suppose. At that point I was hearty and cheerful, and though I had been preparing just as anxiously as she had, I wished, from my superior calm, to reassure her.

“Take it easy,” I told her. “Césare's never been known for his promptness. If he gets here at all, and he might not, he's sure to be late. There's plenty of time. just do your cooking, and relax, and I'll go ahead and straighten up the house, and if worst comes to worst and we have no guests, well sit down together, just me and my Jo-John, and eat the chicken breasts amandine and drink a cold bottle of Green Hungarian together.”

“I don't know,” she said, and looked at me (or herself) and laughed. “If he doesn't come now, after getting us started on this, he'll never be welcome in
my
house again.”

She had the lights on all over the house, to make things more cheerful that dark morning. I got out the vacuum cleaner and plugged it in and made one, pass across the rug, and
pop,
the cleaner's howl died and all the lights went out.

“Oh, I
knew
it!” came Ruth's
cri de coeur
from the kitchen.

“Peace,” I said, unruffled. “It's probably just the circuit breaker.”

Leaving the vacuum where it stood, I went and inspected the panel on the kitchen wall. While I was craning up at it, looking for a breaker that was kinked, the lights flashed on, and the vacuum began to howl and flounder. I arrived just too late to keep it from bumping into the piano leg. As I shut it off and straightened it up Ruth came running, looking like Medea, and popped her finger in her mouth and rubbed it over the dented scar. The lights dimmed to a red pulse, flared up, and went out once more.

Unlighted, the room was gray and cold. The wind went past the plate glass absolutely flat, and rain like tracer bullets swept the tops of the live oaks below the terrace. I could barely see the valley or the country road; the hills opposite were only sodden, running outlines.

“What'll we
do?”
Ruth said.

“Haven't you got candles?”

“Oh, candles! How'm I going to
cook?
How'll we keep the house warm? What'll we do for water? We can't even flush the john.”

True. There are handicaps to country living in an all-electric house whose water is pumped from a well, in a country where the winter ground is like soup, so that trees lie down across the power lines when the wind blows. Once last winter the power was off nearly all day, so long that Ruth and I paid three different calls, to people we didn't especially want to see, just to get to use a bathroom.

On the other hand, I was still feeling cheerful and competent. These little emergencies stir the blood. I cope, therefore I am.

“I'll light the fireplace,” I said. “That'll both warm and cheer us. Johns—I don't know. What if I bring in some pails and kettles from the tank so we don't have to run down the pressure? Keep one flush in each john for the visitors. As for cooking, what is Sterno for?”

“Did you ever try to bake corn fingers with Sterno?” Ruth said. “Did you make an apricot soufflé with Sterno?”

“Maybe they'll just have to do without corn fingers and apricot soufflé.”

“That would be quite a lunch. Chicken and salad.”

“And wine. He's eaten a damned sight worse. At least let's see if we can keep the chicken warm.”

I found two cans of Sterno, another fruit of my preparedness campaign, but no sign of the little tin stove to use them in. Ingenuity suggested tipping up a burner on the electric stove, setting a can of Sterno in the well under it, and tipping the burner back flat. Presto. I was congratulating myself and trying to cheer my determinedly gloomy wife when the door blew open and Minnie stamped in, wet-footed, wet-coated, hoo-hooing like a steamboat, with a wet cigarette pasted to her lower lip.

“Heyyyyy! Ain't
this
some'm!”

Every Tuesday morning she arrives at our door bursting with some dramatic tidings. Like any boiler or pressure tank, she must be eased of her burden gradually. She can't be hurried, she has to bubble and hiss herself quiet Even on such a day as this we know better than to interrupt her show. As when on some hot mountain road a traveler hears the rumblings under the hood, and watches the temperature needle climb past the red and out of sight, and stops and opens the hood, and with handkerchief around hand makes darting stabs at the radiator cap to open it a little, but not too much, so the Allstons gave greetings to their cleaning lady, and waited for the jets of steam.

She kicked off her muddy shoes, she stripped off her raincoat and revealed the white nurse's nylon that gives her status as a professional and imparts a touch of class to the establishments she is willing to assist. Rumbling with phlegmy laughter, squinting against imaginary smoke from the cigarette that had been quenched in her run from car to door, she slid in stocking feet to the kitchen wastebasket and with a wet thumb and finger dropped the disintegrating cigarette in among the garbage.

“You know what I see on my way over? Ha-
hal
Them creeps! Lessee if their zoning laws'll take care of that onel”

Them creeps are the junior executives and computer programmers who occupy the new subdivisions. It is Minnie's contention, with which in the main I agree, that they have ruined the hills by imposing their one-acre, one-house rigidities on land that used to be lived on comfortably by people who respected it. This morning, after waiting an hour while her husband Art dried out her wet distributor, she came over the hill past one of the new tracts just in time to see one of the bulldozed shelves let go its hold and slide smoothly down into the creek, leaving the aghast residents staring from the rain-swept edge of what had once been their front yard.

“Fence, trees, part of the lawn, the whole business,” Minnie said. “I thought of callin' Art, and then I thought, What the hell, let 'em apply to Town Hall.
You
know, Mister Allston, if it was you, or the Pattersons, or somebody decent, Art'd be over in a minute to help. Jeez, it use to be a lot different around here. Everybody helped everybody else, everybody went to the same Christmas and New Year parties, there wasn't any difference except some people had a bigger house and maybe a couple horses in the pasture. And you
knew
people, you'd see things goin' on. Now everybody's behind a chain-link fence, you never see anybody even mowin' his lawn. But you'll see this guy for a while, you can look right in his parlor window. I wisht it would happen to the rest of them. Them creeps with their subdivisions and their tax hikes and their zoning! My God, you can't even build a henhouse without a permit—can't even keep hens, for hell's sake. Got to tie up your dog, can't do this, can't do that, can't keep horses because the neighbors object to all them
flies.
Then that same woman and her phony husband that have sunk all they got, and a lot more, in this place they've made too expensive for anybody to afford it, they go on down to Town Hall twice a month and pass some more laws so their fancy address won't get hurt by dogs and chickens and cluster housing and black people and Chicanos and students and hippies and federallyfinancedlowerincomehousing, all one word. That's their real scare. Honest to God, they cross themselves when they say it.”

Ruth, with her unburned wrist holding up her bangs and her mouth in a rictus, said, “Yes. Well.”

Minnie stowed her shoes and raincoat in the broom closet and stood up, grunting. “Might as well work in stocking feet, so's I won't mess up your floors. God, them people. You know what one of ‘em said to me the other day—Mrs. Barnes, you know her? One of them white tennis dress ones with her legs naked clear to her behind? Runs into me on the road and stops me to ask about Mr. Patterson. Knows I work there. ‘Mister Patterson don't look well,' she says. ‘Looks so pale and thin,' she says. ‘Well,' I says, ‘he's just gettin' over an operation.' ‘Is he gettin' over it?' she wants to know. ‘I heard it's terminal,' she says. ‘I don't know where you heard that,' I says. ‘Far as I know, he's gettin' along fine.' ‘Well, I'm so glad to hear it,' she says, and then she says, like it hasn't been on her mind all the time, ‘Oh, Minnie,' she says—who the hell ever give her the right to call me by my first name?—‘Minnie,' she says, ‘if anything
should
happen to Mister Patterson and they don't need you no more, I hope you'll keep me in mind. It's so hard to find reliable help,' she says, ‘up here in the hills.' Sittin' there waitin' for him to die. Jesus.”

“That's callous,” Ruth said. “I can't imagine people being so callous. Minnie, I wonder...”

“ ‘Why don't you try East Palo Alto?' I ask her, and she says, ‘Oh, I wouldn't
dare
! Bring a
black
into the hills?' she says. ‘It would make me nervous, just knowin' they knew where we live.' ‘Well, Mountain View or Sunnyvale then,' I says. ‘There's plenty people need work.' But she don't like that any better. ‘Chicanos?' she says. ‘Right when La Raza is suin' this town, right this very minute, tryin' to push a lowcosthousingproject on us and break down our zoning? I'd be just every bit as nervous hirin' a Chicano as I would a black.' ‘Well, that's too bad,' I says to her, ‘because you know what my last name is? Garcia.' That kind of scrambled her. ‘Oh, but you're different,' she tries to say. ‘I mean, you're
married
to Mister Garcia but you're not ... And you
live
in the hills, you're a neighbor.' ‘So was a lot of other Chicanos till you crowded them out,' I says. Oh boy, that's some kind of people. Nixon could of got his whole White House staff out of just one subdivision around here. I wish you could of seen them up there on the edge of that bank lookin' down to where their front yard had slid.”

“I wish we had,” Ruth said firmly. “I wish we had time to hear all about it. But we just haven't got time, I'm afraid. We're in a jam, Minnie. We've got people coming for lunch, and the power's off. You know how
that
is. You can't do
anything.
But we've got to, just the same. First thing, I guess you or Joe will have to bring in some buckets of water from the tank.”

“Why sure,” Minnie said. “Whyn't you say? You just tell me what you need done. Oh... hey.” Her eyes were on me.

“What?” I said.

“I. forgot to tell you. But if you got company comin', your culvert's plugged up and there's water runnin' all down your road. I just barely made it up.”

The light came on, dimmed to a glow, fluttered, and went out —some forlorn last kiss of broken wires off in the wet hills. Ruth said in her crisis voice, “I suppose you've got to see what you can do. Minnie'll get me the water. But first bring me in two leaves for the table. Oh, damn, why didn't we say we'd take them out somewhere?”

“Maybe we couldn't get out,” I said. “Maybe he can't get in. Relax. We'll make it.”

“Oh, relax!” Ruth said. When she gets into one of those states she resents any attempt to soothe her. Only last-ditch desperation is permissible.

That was about eleven. Three quarters of an hour later I was still digging, blind with rain, my slicker threatening to lift me up like a hang glider, at the mound of leaves and gravel the flood-water had piled over the entrance to the culvert. Water pouring down against the pile was being deflected out into the road, to go sheeting down the asphalt toward the bottom, where a lake had covered the area between the eucalyptus trees. That culvert was obviously clogged too.

My feet were wet, my pants were soaked to the thighs. As usual, my hands had gone into their Raynaud's syndrome spasm in the cold and were white to the second joints of the fingers. For all that, the adobe mixed with leaves was so impossible to shovel that I finally had to get down and dig at the mass with my hands. Eventually I moved something that counted. The bottom fell out, the stream of water dove downward with a slurp, and across the road I heard the plug of mud and leaves shoot out into the gully. So. Emergency dealt with. I cope, therefore I am. I washed my numb hands in muddy ice water and stood up to shove them between the buttons of my slicker and into my armpits for warming. Then I heard a car at the foot of the hill.