She lay in bed and pretended to be asleep.
“Precious!” he called again, this time more insistently. She-replied with a bogus snore loud enough to inform the wretch that she was asleep.
“Is your mother sleeping?” she heard Henry ask and could not make out Shirley’s garbled reply, so she gave out another thunderous snore that would have made it plain even to a deaf man that she was asleep and snoring.
“She doesn’t usually go to bed this early, does she?” she heard Henry ask again.
Precious tiptoed to the door, stood silently behind it, and blasted a boar’s snore through the wood. There was silence for a moment while the idiot digested the snore. Finally she heard him say in a chastened voice, “I suppose she’s sleeping,” and scrape away from her door as she flung another handful of bullfrog snores after the retreating brute.
“You wretch!” she carped, sneaking back to her bed. “You nearly make me blow me sinus out me nose-hole!”
The next day he was sorry.
He was sorry at breakfast when he fried her an egg even though she had already explained that there wasn’t her equal in the world when it came to egg frying. He was sorry at work, for he called her between perms, she herself being off that day, to say that he was sorry. And he was sorry in the evening hours as he fluffed the cushion of her easy chair when she sat down to watch television. Ever since he recognized her habit of fluffing the cushion before she settled down to a nightly diet of American television murder shows, he had taken this preparatory fluffing upon himself as a bounden duty, and while he fluffed the cushion he explained how sorry he was that he had washed her underwear.
“Precious,” he said earnestly, “I really am sorry. This is a culture difference we’re encountering.”
She snorted.
“Will you forgive me, Precious?” he asked, smiling in a way that God had intended only for the hyena.
She faced him squarely and stared hard at the hands hovering dangerously within fluffing distance of her cushion.
“Sit down over dere!” she ordered. “Leave me alone, Henry. I am in a bad mood.”
So he sat and he gave her that look from the sofa that said, “Precious, how you so fat and juicy, eh?” and she opened her mouth as if to deny that she was fat and juicy and to assert that even if she were, it was still none of his stinking business.
“I’m telling you, Precious,” he lobbed from the sofa, “we’re working through culture conflict here.”
Matters got worse. He mopped her floor. He cooked her a special dessert. He scoured out her tub. And he was watching her. She could tell. He was watching her because he had noticed that she was fat and juicy while his own wife was scrawny and aerobic. She couldn’t really blame him for this interest, however, since everyone knew that one plump woman could drive more man crazy than a thousand female jogger, and he repeatedly told her with his tone and eyes that he had noticed how sweet and juicy she was by asking, “Precious, would you like another cup of coffee?” or, “Precious, do you want to watch another program?” or once, with special effrontery which nearly earned him a box, “Precious, tell me what your favorite dishes are and I’ll cook them.”
That was too much. When he approached her with this impertinence she had to swallow her bile and try to put on her best face knowing fully well that she would dead first before she allowed any man to cook special dish for her. She wouldn’t even wait to dead, she’d just walk up to the empty grave and jump in without further ado.
She said with a thin smile that she had no favorite dishes.
But she must have a favorite dish, he insisted, and if she would only tell him she would make him so very happy.
But no matter how the brute begged to play cook for her, she just smiled and said she had no favorite dishes and so slowly dewormed him, for his own good, of another womanish impulse.
One night after she again repulsed his request to cook her a favorite dish she heard him pacing in the hallway. She glanced up from the television and saw that he was agitated, that he was shooting anxious glances at her such as hungry puss would give out-of-reach bird, and she felt a little sorry for him, for it was not his fault that she looked so fat and juicy, and after all, even though he was too-too he was also a man and couldn’t help himself. To relieve a little of the understandable pressure she was no doubt causing, Precious excused herself and went into her bedroom.
A moment later she thought she heard him sneaking down the hall and suspected that he was outside her door peeping through the keyhole. She crept to the door and peeped back into the keyhole plugged by the blue tint of what she thought was an eye.
With a cry of indignation, she threw the door open.
The hallway was empty. A sliver of light showed under his doorway at the end of the hall. So maybe she had been imagining things, but maybe she had not, for when she peeped back through the keyhole again, she was able to glimpse the empty hallway.
The next day she scolded Shirley for leaving her husband alone too much.
Shirley shrugged wearily, for she had just returned from patrol. “Is true,” she admitted. “I goin’ ride him tonight.”
“Ride him?”
“Yes. Ride him like a mule. Make him feel sweet.”
There was a delicate pause during which Precious digested this unorthodox arrangement. “You ride him? He don’t ride-you?”
Shirley scoffed. “Ride me? You must want me to shoot his-rass!”
So that very evening, true to her word, Shirley began to ride her too-too husband, and even with her door closed and her room down the hall, Precious could hear such disgusting unmanly groaning coming out of him that it set her teeth on edge. He didn’t even know that a man was supposed to erupt in one grateful bellow when he was properly overcome by pum-pum, not moan like a draycart that wanted grease.
Really, if any man had the nerve to carry on so with her, she’d kick him straight out of her bed.
She flung the pillow off her bed, pretending that it was a tootoo man bawling over pum-pum in her ears, and stepped on it so hard that feathers scattered through the room.
Henry made his move a week after Shirley had taken him on her aerobic ride.
Precious was sound asleep in her bed and peacefully dreaming, when through the mists of her dreams she thought she heard her door creak open and foot pad toward her bed, and she thought she felt an interloping batty park on the edge of her mattress, but she dismissed these queasy impressions as part of her dream and tried to roll over, when she felt a clammy hand flutter down atop her pum-pum and brush it ecstatically. She must be dreaming, she told herself sternly, or maybe Theophilus’s duppy had snuck down from heaven to catch a ghostly feel-up or beg a midnight piece, so she cracked her eyes and took a frightened look.
In the dim light of the shadowy bedroom she glimpsed the too-too wretch perched on the edge of her bed and felt nasty too-too hand joyfully combing pum-pum pasture and too-too finger jumping with joy as it drilled for juice.
It was a crisis. Shirley was away on patrol, and the children were sleeping in their room down the hall. Her first impulse was to give the wretch one rass thump and pitch him headlong out the door, but then she thought that the commotion might rouse the children and cause a scandal. So she stirred and spoke with the deliberately slurred speech of one still fluttering in the swirls of a dream.
“Dis must be a dream. Whoever is in my room in my dream had better get out before I wake up and thump him down!”
“Precious,” he whispered, rubbing pum-pum eagerly like he was a barber massaging a bald head with hair tonic. “Precious, is me, Henry!”
“Whoever is in my dream had better uncork pum-pum this instant before I wake up and break off his nasty finger.”
She felt rueful uncorking take place and heard a little sob of bitter longing catch in the beast’s throat.
“Precious! You’re so wonderful!”
“Whoever is in my dream,” she growled, “must have respect for mother-in-law and e
lder. He must get out of my room now before I wake up!”
Another snuffle of longing and regret before alien batty squeaked off her bed and was borne slowly out the door on nighttime interloping foot.
After she was sure that he was gone, Precious got up and locked her door. She returned to bed and snuggled under the blankets and reflected that strangely enough this was the first time she’d felt even grudging respect for the too-too wretch.
She sniffed and smoothed down pum-pum with a comforting rub and goodnight pat, for she felt suddenly drowsy and unable to keep her eyes open.
Nevertheless, it was too bad that she would now have to-move.
And that was the last thought she had before falling into a sweet and refreshing slumber such as only mighty Brutus himself had ever been able to induce.
Chapter 10
Precious awoke the next morning with a bone in her throat. Her-days at Shirley’s were numbered; she would have to find somewhere else to live. It was a terrible realization to wake up to, and she would have much preferred to have opened her eyes and found no crisis waiting at her bedside, but sneaky Henry was sure to come prowling in her bedroom again. She could no longer live with him under the same roof.
“Lawd, I beg you, don’t drop a tin can ’pon me head today!” she moaned her usual wakening prayer before shuffling out of bed and performing her morning wash with a dispirited air.
What would she do and where would she go? How would she explain to Shirley that she suddenly wanted to live on her own, abandoning warmth and family companionship for loneliness and empty evenings? Shirley would think her possessed.
She was brushing her hair, mulling over possibilities and feeling blue, when she was suddenly struck by her own downcast reflection. She stiffened her back and drew herself upright with dignity.
If Henry dared whisper anything romantic at breakfast, she would crack an egg over his head. She crimped her lip with determination, applied her makeup, and sallied into the kitchen.
He was waiting for her at the breakfast table.
He sneak-peeped at her over fuzzy newspaper rim. She said “Good morning” as she always did and he mumbled guiltily into the belly of the sports page. She sat down and peacefully sipped her morning tea and pretended that all was well, though tension and plots bubbled palpably between them.
Precious gazed idly at the newspaper while Henry read and her eyes fell by direction of the Holy Ghost on a want ad for a housekeeper that promised attractive salary, light work, and spacious accommodations with all found. She tried to read it by craning her neck, and as she did so Henry broke the strained silence.
“Precious,” he began, still skulking behind the opened newspaper, “I just want to say—”
“I had a funny dream last night,” she interrupted cheerfully. “I know it was a dream because what I dreamt couldn’t happen in a million years.”
“Precious, please. I know what I did was—”
“It was my bed I was in last night, my innocent bed, and I say dat what happened there was only a dream. A bad dream. Now, lend me dis piece of paper, please, to read on de toilet.”
She took the want ad section from him, after thus brutally reminding him that while she no doubt appeared heavenly and beguiling, she still possessed the schoolbook twenty-three feet of bowels along with anal opening and was compelled by nature to do unseemly number two every morning, which realization she hoped would cool his ardor and bring him down to earth.
Then she sauntered off to the bathroom with the grim matronly tread of a respectable middle-aged woman about to perform her morning movement.
She had the interview for the housekeeper’s job that very same day. She called the ad and spoke to a man with an accent, and after he had questioned her on the telephone, he suggested that she take a cab and be interviewed in person.
She spent an hour achieving impeccability of grooming before taking a cab to the address. The cab prowled tentatively through a neighborhood of towering mansions that peered down on the vulgar public road from behind a screen of lawns, hedges, trees, and spiked wrought-iron fences.
“This is the place,” the driver said, plainly impressed, as he turned off the meter.
Precious paid the fare and stepped out, checking her footing as though she suspected that the asphalted pavement was boobytrapped. The cab drove off and she was left standing alone before a scrolled iron gate and gawking uncertainly through a spiked fence into the yard, when, suddenly, a television camera mounted on the fencepost swivelled with a watchful hum and peered down at her.
“Can I help you?” the camera asked metallically.
Precious stared up at it and stated her business in a quavering voice, feeling like an embezzler in a cathedral. Her heart began to pound with fright. The voice instructed her to stand back and the gate slid quietly open on rollers while the television camera stared morbidly after her as she entered the gravel driveway.
Precious crunched down the driveway in tottery heels, her heart beating fast, conscious that she was badly out of place, gaping at the landscaped gardens like one who had blundered into the enchanted woods of a fairy tale. From her shaky step, she might have been walking to the gallows, and the trip of her heart as she drove deeper and deeper toward the palatial house made her so breathless that she scowled and reminded herself that underfoot burrowed the same nasty freeloading worm of any tenement. She was a Christian woman destined for heaven and would not be made to feel inferior by worldly wealth, and she muttered as much to an immaculately trellised rosebush that struck an uppity and overarching pose as she hobbled past.
She was nearing the massive flanks of the mansion when she suddenly glimpsed a steamship smokestack, complete with intricate rigging and whistle, enmeshed in the web of trees that towered over the eaves behind the main house. She stopped dead in her tracks, wondering how they had managed to build a pond big enough to hold a ship, when she realized that the back of the yard bordered on water and that the ship was not cemented on the lawn but sailing past on a canal in the Atlantic.
Only one thing struck her as odd about the grounds. Scattered over the lawns and between the ornamental shrubs she thought she glimpsed some eight or nine stumps of fire hydrants. At first she thought her eyes were deceiving her and that she must be looking at plants bred by ne’er-do-well American botanists to resemble hydrants, but when she stopped and took a careful look she saw that she had made no mistake. Fire hydrants were definitely planted among the lawns and gardens; fire hydrants, without question, down even to the fluted dwarf torso and the lurid municipal red.
Well, at least if she got the job here and lived in this house she would never have to worry about fire, she smugly thought, continuing down the driveway until she found herself standing before an ornate and self-assertive front door whose knobs, embossed decorations, and leaded stained-glass exulted boastfully to the world, “I am Almighty Door.”
“Lawd have mercy!” she muttered with a greater tripping of-her heart as she gave Almighty Door a solid thump with her knuckles to demonstrate that man-made door could never be mightier than God-made woman.
Her interviewer was a short dapper East Indian man with the melancholy air of a clerk who’d just emerged from a gloomy matinee. He had a thick head of inky hair surgically parted in the middle and smooth cheeks inlaid with the grainy shadow of a beard. He was deferential and polite in the manner of educated East Indians and practically bowed and scraped with apology as he led her into the kitchen for the interview.
He said his name was Mannish Chaudhuri and that he was the chauffeur and general factotum for the mistress of the house, and while she was away it had fallen upon him to screen applicants for the housekeeping position and make a recommendation about their suitability. To this end, he continued, he was obliged to ask her some pertinent questions, and trusted she would not be offended by them.
Precious remarked that as a Christian woman with a vigilant soul, she was ready at this instant to appear before the Throne of
Judgment, let alone before some ordinary facto—
“What you say you are again?”
“Factotum,” Mannish replied primly, adding, “It is a Latin word for someone who does all.”
So she said that she was ready and willing to endure any worldly interview, and to indicate as much, she interlaced her kerchief between her fingers, settled them in her lap, and put on her church-going face.
The interview went badly at first, for as Mannish brewed her a cup of tea, Precious suddenly remembered what his name reminded her of—mannish water, a clear soup boiled from goat testicles and thought to restore flagging sexual vigor in men—and struggled vainly against the impulse to smirk.
“I said something amusing?” Mannish asked, missing nothing as he returned with the steeped tea to begin the serious questioning.
Precious sternly swallowed her grin.
“We have a soup name mannish water in Jamaica,” she finally said offhandedly, trying to wriggle out of it and move briskly along.
“Oh, you do. What kind of soup, if I may ask?”
“A broth.”
“Oh. And how is this broth made?”
“With goat.”
“With what part of goat, if I may ask?”
“The bottom part.”
“Oh. Is that the part the world knows as the tail?”
Precious looked up sharply at him, determined to repel all Indian irony.
“No,” she corrected boldly. “It is made of the part dat hang down underneath the male goat.”
Mannish blinked as if he had suddenly been stung by a gnat in an unscratchable place. He was obviously not a man given to extreme reaction, and his blinking looked to Precious as much of a flinch as the poor soul could muster.
She pressed on with the full truth, harsh though it might be. “Men say it invigorates their nature. Personally, I don’t believe it. But certain men say-so.”
“And it has my name. I must try this soup someday and see if it has the desired effect.”
He smiled unctuously and resumed the polite questioning.
Dog War Page 7