Let's go For Broke

by Mary Lasswell

  “What about him?” Miss Tinkham gestured to the truck owner with her thumb. “How would he manage without the plates on the Cadillac?”

  “Hell, let him worry about that,” Mrs. Feeley said. “He’s a man an’ the laws o’ this world was made for the benefit o’ them that wears their pants on the outside.”

  “Of course we would have to tell him about them, but if he went ahead and assumed the responsibility anyway, it wouldn’t be any…”

  Mrs. Feeley thoughtfully scratched her rump. “If we rent the parkin’ lot to the boy, we could use the money to pay for the truck,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t leave us much to live on. We’re gettin’ by on about $52 now. But then we was figgerin’ to live off’n the land, wasn’t we?” Mrs. Rasmussen’s tone showed her relish for the prospect.

  “Sure have to scrimp to squeak by,” Mrs. Feeley said. “But seems like things is more fun when we’re on short grass.”

  “We were born to live dangerously,” Miss Tinkham said.

  The owner of the truck and Old-Timer came out of the kitchen and went towards the truck.

  “You’d not expect us to buy no pig in a poke,” Mrs. Feeley said. “We’d want to try the truck out ourselves…uh, see how she does on the rough ground. Can’t always have the hardtop, you know.” She winked at the ladies. “Might wanna get off the strip sometime.”

  “Anywheres a tractor, a jeep, or a bulldozer’ll go, this baby’ll go and do as good as them or better. How do I know you won’t wreck her on me, did I leave you try it out?”

  “With Old-Timer driving?” Miss Tinkham raised her eyebrows.

  The man scratched his head: “Tell you what. I’ll let you take her if you let me keep the Cadillac till you bring my truck back in good shape. Be kinda like a honest-penny.”

  “Fair exchange is no robbery.” Miss Tinkham and Mrs. Rasmussen went in to get the key. “We wouldn’t give any earnest money until we tested the truck and you returned our car.”

  “You bring it back without a scratch tomorrow night, mister. Be here by dark, not any later, an’ maybe we can do some horse-tradin’.” Mrs. Feeley listened with pride to the smooth purr of the motor as the truck driver expertly backed out the blue Cadillac.

  “If I sell, I’m aimin’ to buy in with another feller down at National City that’s openin’ a Tramp Village.”

  “Don’t let the vice squad catch you,” Mrs. Feeley warned.

  “Aw, hit ain’t nothin’ but them nets folks jumps up an’ down on.”

  “Like trying to stand up in a hammock?” Miss Tinkham said. “I think he is referring to trampoline.”

  “That’s a purty name! Who is she?” Mrs. Feeley asked.

  “Speaking of names,” Miss Tinkham said, “this is Mrs. Feeley and Mrs. Rasmussen. I am Miss Tinkham. What’s your name?”

  “Otho Fikes, from Piggott, Arkansas.” He raced the motor, eager to be off.

  “Say, some kinda brush is stuck on the bumper…knock it off, will ya?” He looked back at the ladies where they stood.

  “Oh, no,” Miss Tinkham said. “That’s like a four-leaf clover: for good luck, you know.”

  “Good luck?” the man said.

  “It just happens that those are 1958 plates,” she said.

  “You said you done drove it today.”

  The three ladies nodded.

  “You must be broke out all over with four-leaf clovers, takin’ a chancet like that.”

  “No sweat,” Mrs. Feeley shrugged. “What the matter with you? Chicken?”

  For answer, the man gunned the limousine and whooshed out of the drive and off towards National City.

  “I still have the feeling somebody should have signed SOMETHING!” Miss Tinkham said as she closed the door to the icebox after getting out the bedtime beer.

  Chapter 3

  BY FOUR Saturday afternoon Mrs. Rasmussen sat next to Old-Timer in the cab of the red truck in order to give him directions. Mrs. Feeley and Miss Tinkham sat on upturned boxes in the back.

  It had been a day of champing delay for the four residents of Noah’s Ark, one of those days when one set of complications had developed after another.

  Finally, after much diplomatic speeding of the parting guest, they had managed to get rid of Darlene’s husband, back from a long cruise as purser on a banana boat.

  “Such close neighbors an’ all,” Mrs. Rasmussen said, “us bein’ the ones that got ’em married, an’ always bringin’ us nice things from way off…say, what in thunder we gonna do with all that there stalk o’ bananas? They don’t go good with beer.”

  “Sell ’em.” Mrs. Feeley settled that.

  “Don’t it seem like it’s a lot longer than it was goin’ out yesterday?” she hollered through the Venetian blind. “I don’t remember this road.”

  “I was wonderin’ did we overshot ourselves,” Mrs. Rasmussen said in a puzzled tone. “The cops had me so rattledy.”

  “What we need is someone to press the panic button,” Miss Tinkham said. “You would find a turn-off quickly enough then. Just take the first right-hand exit you come to…it’s bound to lead to something.”

  Wordlessly in blazing late afternoon heat with dry white dust sifting into the creases under their sweat-stung eyes, the ladies and Old-Timer rolled over highways, byways, traffic circles, and cloverleaves until the gas gauge tipped dangerously to the left.

  “We’re gettin’ no nearer fast,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “We should have dropped a trail of little white pebbles yesterday, but of course we didn’t come home the same way we went out.” The four sat desolate, like the centipede in the ditch “considering how to run.”

  “Don’t seem like we was ever really there,” Mrs. Feeley said quietly, “but I seen that rat.”

  Miss Tinkham snapped her fingers and scrabbled through her bag. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think my passion for overlooking the obvious amounts to genius. Think, Tinkham, think: there must be a harder way! All in the world we have to do is to call Mr. Elmo Gates and ask for directions on how to get to the place!”

  “I’d give a dollar to a thought o’ that,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “You know,” she smiled, “we was like kids goin’ to a picnic, so excited we clean forgot the beer!”

  “First time in our life,” Mrs. Feeley laughed.

  “Let us take the first road we see that might lead to a filling station,” Miss Tinkham said. “Not a bar,” she corrected gently as the two other ladies giggled. “The red dragon is dangerously dry.” Old-Timer started the truck and veered into an exit that carried them to a gas station within less than a quarter of a mile. While the four enjoyed an ice-cold beer. Miss Tinkham asked the young man at the filling station how much it cost to call La Mesa.

  “I’ll just ask Mr. Gates the directions to the Mansion,” she said.

  “You’re almost there,” the boy said.

  “Better anyway,” Mrs. Feeley said. “Place so hard to find, an’ all, he never could tell us how to get there. Seems to me like the best bet is to go right there an’ buttonhole him. Tell him we seen it an’ we want it cheap!”

  “I think there is something to what you say,” Miss Tinkham said. “Any kind of crackpot with a nickel in his hand can call up and ask about property! We’ll go in person. It creates a better impression.”

  She produced the address and after the attendant’s clear and courteous directions, it was scarcely more than a few minutes before they drove up and Old-Timer parked the truck in front of the office of Elmo Gates, attorney at law. The three mounted the outside staircase to the office and entered.

  A wispy, irascible man who seemed in great mental anguish was backed up against the wall by three burly men not wearing uniforms but having every appearance of being storm troopers. They were shaking their fingers in his face. The three ladies ignored the officers.

  “We came to inquire about a certain reddish granite pseudo-Victorian, decaying relic located on approximately three acres of land situated a
t a five-point intersection listed as being in your charge,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “Can’t you see they got me surrounded? Can’t you see I’ve got my back to the wall?” he shouted. “Rats, bats, gnats! Lice, mice, vice! These cossacks are after me! Department of health. See these gray hairs? See this pot belly? It’s nothing but a Texas-size ulcer!”

  “That’s some ti-rage you’re havin’,” Mrs. Feeley said affably.

  “Come back another day, will you?” he said.

  Before anyone could answer, the lawyer and his three inquisitors jet-propelled themselves down the stairs and into a car with an official look to it.

  “Foller him!” Mrs. Feeley shouted, tumbling after him.

  Old-Timer, his veins full of tally-ho, kept on the trail like a bloodhound. In an incredibly short time they reached the intersection of the day before.

  “Five Points!” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Lookit: Fairy Oaks, one mile. San Diego, eight miles.”

  “We driv’ at least thirty ’fore we got here today,” Mrs. Feeley said as they bumped right in after the official-looking car, which whined to a halt right where the ladies had stopped the day before. As the men in the big car were piling out, Mrs. Rasmussen whispered to Old-Timer: “Let’s just pull in outa their way behin’ one o’ these pa’ms here. This road’s a booger to back out of, without no red truck behind you.”

  So dense was the overgrowth and underbrush that Mrs. Feeley and her three friends were able to follow the lawyer and his custodians right up to the house without being seen. Several doors were open and the men who looked like officers had kicked in some of the planks of the front porch.

  “They’re layin’ down the law about somethin’,” Mrs. Feeley muttered.

  “We’ve warned you before,” one of the men said to Elmo Gates. “The Department of Public Health feels certain that the number of rodents and vermin this place breeds is sufficient to start an epidemic of sizable proportions. It could even harbor bubonic plague.

  “Our final word to you, sir, is one month in which to exterminate, or we condemn it and have it bulldozed as a menace to public health and sanitation.”

  “You can’t do that,” Elmo Gates protested feebly. “With thirteen heirs scattered to the ends of the earth, and only one of them even faintly solvent and that one in a private lunatic asylum, what chance do I have? This white elephant costs me money every month of my life, and it’s not even mine. The postage alone runs me thirty dollars! They can’t sell, lease, or even rent because I can’t line up the signatures and there is insufficient money for any repair. The new freeway has cut off the place from the highways and depreciated the value to almost nothing. The whole property is tied up in a snarl that it would take an act of God to unravel.”

  “Won’t the court appoint a custodian? Some kind of conservator for the mental patient? There is bound to be a solution to this thing,” one of the health officers said.

  “I am the legal guardian of the mentally incompetent one,” Elmo Gates explained. “She’s the only one living in the United States. Her income is never enough to keep the taxes up to date. I’ve been fool enough to put some of my own money into it just to keep it from being sold for taxes. This freeway has really ruined what chances there might have been of getting a little something back out of it. I don’t believe we could ever give a clear title.”

  “But you see our position,” the first officer said. “The boss is riding us on this and we’ve got to have action. Complaints about the rats are coming in day and night.”

  Mrs. Feeley pushed her way through the underbrush and stepped up into the conversation. The officers looked over her costume of black slacks and black cotton smock.

  “All you need, mister, is cats,” she said.

  The health officers grinned: “There you are! Thirty days, remember! Want a lift back to town?”

  “We’ll take him.” Mrs. Feeley spoke for the attorney who was leaning against the wall nibbling his nails.

  “Prophetic words,” Miss Tinkham muttered to Mrs. Rasmussen.

  “What you want is a caretaker. Now, for hardly no pay at all my friends an’ me will take care o’ this place for you, bring in twenty-seven cats and clear out your troubles in no time. Our Useful Man, here, he’s handy at all kinds of odd jobs. We can move in right away and start to work any time you say.”

  “I don’t know anything at all about you. There is no money to make even the most basic repairs in plumbing. Certainly no money to pay salaries. I go in the hole every month myself!”

  “How is it,” Miss Tinkham ventured, “that the heirs are not in the United States, except for the one unfortunate you mentioned?”

  “American servicemen married to foreigners. Two were killed during the war and three died after it was over. All left children. Some in Italy, some in Australia…” He produced a letter on thin paper and handed it to Miss Tinkham. “Look at this! What am I supposed to make out of those squiggles?”

  “It’s Arabic,” Miss Tinkham said. “I think you read it from right to left.”

  “Upside down or sideways,” Mr. Gates said. “It would be all the same to me. I can’t get any sensible response out of any of them.”

  “It is the first time I ever heard of any foreigner not wanting a Yankee dollar,” Miss Tinkham said.

  Mr. Gates looked up at her sharply. Her zebra-striped pants and black jersey bound together with the scarlet cummerbund might not be an accurate index to her I.Q.

  “Yessiree,” Mrs. Feeley said, “you’re all fouled up like a married mess cook. An’ when them Board o’ Health gets through with you…”

  “Why would any responsible persons want to come out here to live?” he asked logically enough.

  Miss Tinkham drew herself up to her full five-foot-ten and swung her long scarlet beads rapidly.

  “Mrs. Feeley owns a sizable rental property and parking lot in the business district of San Diego,” she said. “The spiral of inflation in which we are all caught up at present makes it necessary for us to augment our incomes, and the most sensible way to do that is to reduce the outgo. The tax collector’s office or anyone in the vicinity in which she lives can give you whatever references you wish. She has owned the property fifty years. I am a retired schoolteacher and Mrs. Rasmussen is the widow of a veteran of World War One.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “Don’t see what you got to get uppity about,” Mrs. Feeley interrupted him. “One thing sure: we couldn’t do it no HARM!”

  What might have been the beginning of a faint smile or maybe only a gas pain passed over Mr. Gate’s harried face.

  “It’s just that the idea is so new to me,” he said. “You nor no one else could live in it. You have no idea of how awful it is inside. Just look!” He led the way into the kitchen. The planks creaked and bent under his feet as the ladies followed him, striving to conceal their eagerness.

  “This kitchen would be invaluable if we ever gave a production of Macbeth,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “More like for them Howloween witches, only it ain’t seen even a wore-out broom in years,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. She opened the door to a large cupboard and the door sagged down on her shoulder.

  “See what I mean?” Elmo Gates sighed. Mice scurried out from the cooler under the sink and Miss Tinkham climbed onto a backless chair which promptly bent at the knees under her slight weight. Mrs. Feeley and Mrs. Rasmussen began to laugh as they helped her up off the floor, deep in loose dust. “Your face was funny,” Mrs. Feeley said. “Like you was decidin’ which was worst, the mice or the chair…an’ the mice won.”

  “If the kitchen’s bad, it’s always the worst-lookin’ place in a house,” Mrs. Rasmussen said, “’cause it orta be the nicest.”

  They pushed open the door into a passageway with four small rooms on either side of the corridor. Gaslight fixtures dangled crazily in the corridor. To the right at the end of the corridor was an ancient room that might possibly be a bathroom.

  “Tin tub w
ith a wooden rim,” Mrs. Feeley laughed. “Ain’t seen one since before Feeley died. He whitewashed the inside o’ ours oncet, an’ I tell you when that there started flakin’ off, it was rough on rats!”

  “Look at the geyser,” Miss Tinkham waved towards a spiral coil of something black that had once been a water heater. “It belongs in the Smithsonian Institution, but if it works, what’s the difference. And a wood stove! My idea of heaven: heat in the bathroom!”

  Mrs. Feeley gave the geyser a kick and it flew into flakes.

  “Cold baths are more salutary, anyway,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “We can always heat a kettle o’ water on this little heatin’ stove,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “I am sure this was the servants’ bath,” Miss Tinkham said, pulling the wooden plug that hung at the end of a long chain from a tank up near the ceiling.

  “Sure takes you back, don’t it?” Mrs. Feeley grinned. “Some of our friends would have some right smart remarks to make about that ‘pull the chain’ business, wouldn’t they?”

  “Somewhere in this mansion there is bound to be something that works,” Miss Tinkham said as she caught sight of Elmo Gates’s disconsolate face peeping at them from the door. “If we had a windfall we didn’t really need, we could re-do this place in high style.”

  “We can get by in the kitchen an’ them little bedrooms for a while till we kinder get the hang o’ the place,” Mrs. Rasmussen whispered. Mrs. Feeley nodded. “Let’s go nail him down.”

  “The main thing is to get our toe in the door.”

  The lawyer was waiting in the kitchen with what seemed like a gleam of interest on his face.

  “There is a well and fine cistern attached to the cellar,” he said. The spongy planks on which he stood had rotted away until the cistern could be seen plainly.

  “Sure,” Mrs. Rasmussen pointed to the pump handle beside her, “this here is what pumped the water to the zink or maybe for washin’ hair.”

  Mr. Gates leaned over to see if he could take the cap off the cistern at the very moment Mrs. Rasmussen chose to try out the handle of the pump. With a dry crunch the boards gave way beneath him and down he went into the cellar. The jagged, rotten boards framed his head like a halo.