Behind him, Janet Runcible said something that he could not catch, a low murmur. She followed him at a distance to the kitchen, and, as he plugged in the pot, she placed herself by the refrigerator. Folding her arms, she leaned against the refrigerator; she did not sit down, as he had expected her to.
“It’s already made,” he said, in what he knew to be a begrudging tone.
But she did not seem to care what his tone was. She did not notice what he said; she continued to gaze at him fixedly. It made him nervous and irritable. So he did not sit down, either; he stationed himself opposite her and returned her gaze.
She said finally, “You’re not working.”
“No,” he said.
“You’re home.”
“I quit my job,” he said. His resentment grew until he could only by a great effort contain it. He willed himself to become calmer. Take it easy, he told himself. This is an ignorant bag from up the hill who has nothing to do but sit home all day, and who has a natural avid curiosity about everyone and everything in town. This is all she has, this prying into other people’s troubles. These harpies feed on gossip and misery and scandal; they listen for it all day long. From here she’ll go to the next house, and from there to the next.
I have to humor her, he told himself. Out of charity.
Janet Runcible said, “Are you building a bird house?”
“No,” he said. “I am putting up a door.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“At work.”
“In San Francisco?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did she get a nice job?”
“Yes,” he said.
“How long is she going to be working?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“She doesn’t like to work, does she?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He shrugged, holding down his antipathy for this woman. He made his voice toneless.
“Has she ever worked before? During your marriage?”
“No,” he said.
Janet Runcible said, “You shouldn’t let her work.”
Unable to keep the savagery out of his voice he said, “Is that so.”
She did not appear to notice his tone. She did not seem to care. “It’s wrong,” she said, “for the husband to stay home and the wife work.”
“I see,” he said. He put enormous heavy irony into his voice; it staggered with sarcasm.
“You should try to get a job again as soon as possible.”
“It’s a little hard,” he said. “With no car.”
“You could take the Greyhound bus in.”
He said, “I’ll wait.”
“What will you wait for?”
“I’ll wait to get my license back.”
Janet said, “Leo did not know you were really drunk. He only thought you were drunk.”
As far as he was concerned, her husband’s opinion of the matter was of no consequence to him.
But something had gone wrong. The woman’s face had become absolutely white. She stared at him. He thought that she was having some kind of attack; the idea flashed through his mind that she was an epileptic or something. That would explain her disorganized walk, he thought. Her sloppy manner; it would explain that.
Her lips moved. “I have to go,” she said almost inaudibly; she turned, her arms still folded, and bolted towards the door. Through the house she ran. He followed after her, astonished.
At the front door she halted, in a state of confusion; she fooled with the knob, unable to open the door. Now tears had begun to roll down her cheeks. “Oh god,” she said, letting her head fall forward until it struck against the door.
“What is it?” he said, not coming too close to her; he had a physical aversion to touching her.
“I just realized,” she said; her eyes, blind and flat, peered at him.
And at that he, too, realized. He understood what she had meant. He saw why she had reacted. Why it was so important.
“Your husband called the police on me?” he said. “That night?”
The blind, pale eyes continued to stare at him; now they stared past him. She was crying and mumbling, but he could not make out what she was trying to say.
“That bastard,” he said. “That dirty fucking bastard.”
Sliding upright, supporting herself against the door, Janet Runcible became calmer. With labored dignity she said, “My husband did what was right.”
“Right,” he echoed.
“You might have run over some child.” Opening the door she went out onto the porch. With elaborate caution she took hold of the railing and started down step by step.
He said, “I wish I had run over you and your husband.”
To that she said nothing. Her back to him, she continued on down the path to the road. Without looking his way she started up the hill once more, towards her own house. Soon she had gone.
So he did do it, Walt Dombrosio thought. I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure. That stupid woman. That ugly sagging stupid woman.
Presently he returned to his workshop. He turned the saw back on and resumed his work. His hands were shaking so badly that he had to stop almost at once. So, instead of working, he stood doing nothing, his hands in his pockets. And gradually, by degrees, his fingers searched once more for the swelling at his groin. Testing its existence, its perpetual presence in his life.
10
The house which Mr. and Mrs. Diters had bought could not be occupied until the utilities had been turned on, and Leo Runcible knew that from experience. It would be three days until the butane truck showed up from San Rafael, but there was supposed to be an emergency tank of butane at the feed store in Carquinez. If someone could transport the tank by car to the Diterses’ house, and could hook it up to their butane pipe, they would have both heat and hot water, but otherwise not. The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph at San Rafael took their name and promised to send out a man with a phone before very long. The PG&E turned on the electricity at once, and the West Marin Water Company had never turned the water off at all; it was not safe to operate the ancient, rusty valve.
After he had got the hurried call from the Diterses, Runcible drove leisurely over to the feed store for the butane tank. It weighed something like a hundred pounds and he was not certain if he could handle it. But, he decided, between himself and Diters they could get it out of the car and across the field to the pipe. As far as attaching it went, he did not expect trouble. He had done such things many times. All he needed was a crescent wrench, and he had that in the glove compartment of the car.
He found the Diterses in the front yard. The moving van had left off their personal and household goods, evidently; he saw a huge pile of cartons, wrapping paper, boxes and barrels to the side of the house. And the flowers growing along the walk had been trampled.
“How’s it going?” he called as he got out of his car.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Diters seemed keyed-up but cheerful. “The moving men broke a step,” Diters said. “Unless it was already broken.”
“I think it happened when they carried the piano in,” his wife said. “Do you know, before they unload the van they make you sign a paper saying all your goods are undamaged?”
Going indoors with them, Runcible found that although they had unpacked most of the cartons they had not tried to put anything away. They had only wanted to see what damage had taken place on the trip over the mountain. Dishes, books, chairs, rugs, clothing, had been put everywhere, in no order.
“Let’s get this butane attached,” he said to Diters. “I’ll need you; I can’t manage it alone.”
As he and the old man dragged the cylinder from the car, Diters said, “I appreciate your kindness, Mr. Runcible. You didn’t have to bring this over.”
“I want you to have heat,” Runcible said. “It gets cold up here at night.”
While they were attaching the pipe to the cylinder, the old man leaned towards him and said, “You don’t suppose that step
was already broken, do you? On a nice little house like this, in such good shape.”
Runcible, concentrating on the pipe, said, “I can assure you that the step was in absolutely perfect condition. Do you have any idea what a piano and four men weigh? Over a ton. There isn’t a front step in the United States built to take weight like that. You could pay forty thousand—ninety thousand—for a house, a brand new house you had built yourself, and the same thing could happen. And I’ll tell you something else.” He paused in the job of tightening up the nut. “There’s a man here in town, John Flores. He can repair that for a dollar or so.”
The old man’s face showed his relief. How small it seemed, now. No need to fuss, Runcible thought to himself.
“I’ll give you his phone number,” Runcible said, as he got the nut tight. “We all call on him when we need something done.”
Later, as he drove home to change his clothes, he thought to himself. But you won’t get hold of John Flores right away. Flores was busy.
The entire back field past the Dombrosios’ house had been dug up by the gang of high school boys that Flores always hired when he got hold of a leaching line job. Pipe had already been brought in, unloaded and stacked up, along with an enormous pile of gravel.
Slowing his car almost to a stop, Runcible leaned out to see how the job was going. In addition to the high school boys he saw a gang of younger children, boys and girls from the grammar school; they stood together on a rise of ground, watching the digging. Among the group his own boy Jerome stood; he was so busy watching that he did not see his father.
I wonder how much it’s costing, Runcible said to himself. And can they pay for it? Does she make as much as he did? Probably not. Women are generally paid less than men, even for the same work.
Tooting his horn, he managed to dislodge his son’s attention from the digging. Jerome waved, and Runcible waved back. The trench extended from the patio of the Dombrosio house for a distance of sixty or so feet, he estimated. Then, at a distribution box, it branched in two directions. The box had already been built. He could see the redwood sections set down in the trench.
The work had been going on for several days, now, and progress was slow. Flores had no power equipment; he depended on the shovels of the boys. It’s a wonder, Runcible thought, that they didn’t carry the gravel in on their backs. That picture amused him; the boys, like Chinese coolies, bent almost double, trudging in a line from the Joslin Gravel Works along the Petaluma Road and then down Highway One to Carquinez, up the hill to the Dombrosio house at the Chevron Station turn-off. They could roll the pipe part of the way, he decided.
From his living room, the view was not promising. Below, the dirt and pipes and gravel spread out prominently. And what is it, he asked himself, but a project to transfer crap from the Dombrosio house to the outside world? And we have to watch it going on; we have to look down at the pipes and gravel that will compensate the world for the fact that Waller and Sherry Dombrosio have to go, at intervals, to the can.
This sort of joking speculation was typical of the area, of course, whenever a new septic tank or leaching field was put in. But he did not feel in a joking mood; he did not get the same enjoyment from bucolic earthy humor that the rustics did. If I have to take it, he thought. I’ll take it in Breugel pictures.
In his bedroom he removed his coat and shirt and tie. While lugging the butane cylinder with Diters he had got black gunk all over his front. And, he noticed now, the cuffs of his trousers had caked mud on them. When had that happened? Probably very early in the day, at the first open field he had come to. No one could walk about in the country without getting gunk and mud on him; it was a foolish man who wore a business suit, white shirt and tie…but what alternative did a Realtor have? I have to meet the public, he said to himself. And I have to get outdoors and poke around. So he had long ago resigned himself to having to change his clothes a couple of times a day.
You can move out here, he thought as he put on a clean shirt, a civilized, cultured man of the world, and shortly you are seated on the same hole as the rest of them; you are crapping into a long pipe and treading on the same stuff. If you scratch your hand on a rusty nail you die, like an old sheep, of tetanus; you go galloping around the field having convulsions. Out here (he rehearsed a kind of gloomy parody of his customary speech to prospects) you don’t die of arterial sclerosis or throat cancer; you get run over by a mowing machine or thrashed to death or you get lung worms. Or—and this was a fear that he could not lose—your butane stove blows up and splashes you across the pasture that you have invested your life savings in.
Having found his new trousers he finished dressing and then left the bedroom.
At the window he paused to glance down at the digging.
Try and discuss art out here, he said to himself. While a gang of grinning teen-age rustic simps are digging leaching lines below your window. Try to keep talking year after year about the cultural possibilities of this place, its pastoral beauties, its repose. The news up here is that the man next door got his hand lopped off while working part time at the mill. And that is all the news. A cow, maybe, got run over by a bread truck. Or a bob cat came down at night and ate someone’s duck.
And at this moment, the news is that John Flores is digging three hundred feet of leaching line, and everyone is talking about it; all the kids are lined up, even my own kid, watching every bit they can see. How much is it costing? That’s the question. How much is being dug? That’s vital, too. And what symptoms were there?
He made a mental note: find out what per-foot rate Flores is charging him.
Even me, he thought. I have to know, too. Because there’s nothing else to know. When you live small you think small.
I wonder what it would take to make them think big, he asked himself. In fact, he thought, I wonder what big would be, out here.
Now he noticed, out in the yard, his wife gardening. She had on jeans and an oriental hat and old shoes. Kneeling, Janet weeded with a metal-pronged tool among her bed of strawberries.
Are the idiotic better off than we are? he asked himself.
Some people are happy in this little way. Scratching in the earth, hour by hour. My wife, he thought. The other wives, the farm women. Yes, Janet is content when she can be like them. When she can’t be, then the torment begins.
He thought, That is why she likes it out here; there is no complexity. Nothing to strain her, to put what she calls “pressure” on her.
He walked to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the porch.
Down the road something moved. A shape, in the road, and he could not identify it. Voices carried to him, shrill. He saw, at last, that three boys were doing something in the road. Gradually they toiled up the hill until he saw that they had a wagon.
What are they pushing? he wondered. The wheels of the wagon squeaked rustily. The boys shouted at one another. They put their weight against the wagon, pushing it on up. At a house they halted, braced the wagon; one boy went up the path and knocked on the door of the house. When the door opened, the boy showed something in his hands and also pointed at the wagon.
Selling something, Runcible realized. Once again. What is it this time? Wrong season for apples.
Should he wait? He lingered on the porch, not going to his car. Janet won’t hear them, he decided; she is too far lost in her gardening. She had not even heard him.
His wife, weeding, absorbed in her work. The leach lines below did not annoy her. The work in progress. The noise. How insulated, he thought. Would I like to be her? Here come the boys toiling up the hill with a wagon of something to sell; I see them; I hear them, I am aware of them, and so I have to stay here until they arrive.
The price we pay, he thought. For noticing.
Now the boys spied him. Yes, he thought as he stood waiting. A customer. The boys yelled at each other and redoubled their efforts; the wagon groaned and increased its speed up the hill. What did he see? Dirt, it looked like. Brown soil
spilling from the wagon, and stones among the dirt. It did not appear very promising. Already, before they had even reached him, he fished in his pockets to be sure he had change. Embarrassing if he didn’t.
“Hey, Mr. Runcible!” one of the boys called. They were older than Jerome. Eighth or ninth graders.
He nodded to them.
Puffing, the boys arrived with their wagon, all of them grinning at him hopefully.
“What do you have?” he asked.
“Arrowheads,” a boy said.
“Indian relics,” another boy put in merrily. Together, the boys brought the wagon around to show him; he saw a confusion of dirt and objects. Now a boy held out some small objects in a handkerchief. Runcible, lifting the edge of the handkerchief aside, saw two black arrowheads. Obsidian, he realized. The best kind found in the area. Highly prized.
“How much?” he said.
The boy who held the arrowheads said. “A dollar.”
“For both?” he said.
The boys gathered for hasty agreement. “Apiece,” the first boy answered presently.
Picking up the arrowheads he examined them carefully. In his years of living in the area, he had never found an arrowhead himself, although he had always wanted to; had, in fact, always hoped and expected to. Eventually he would find one, he had reasoned, and he had not been impatient. There was no pressing need to find one. And he had seen a number of them, in various homes. He had heard stories of men finding beautiful large obsidian arrowheads in plain sight, in the middle of the road, or visible near the shore of an inlet or estero. Was there any point in buying them? he asked himself. Was the pleasure entirely in the finding? These did look like good ones, he thought. And he could display them in his office.
That idea pleased him. “Okay,” he said, getting out his wallet. As he paid over the two dollars he indicated the wagon and said, “What’s all that?”
“Relics,” one of the boys said. “All kinds.”
“More arrowheads?” he asked.
They seemed uncertain. “No,” one boy said finally; he rummaged about in the dirt and held up what appeared to be a granite chunk. “This is an Indian tool.”
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike Page 14