Man Drowning

by Henry Kuttner

  “Not Mrs. De Anza.”

  “Sure. That jewelry she wears. Real silver, real tur-turk—the blue stones. Good luck.”

  “Turquoises?”

  “Sí, hombre. You wear those stones, you no get the poison. You never hear that?”

  “No. It isn’t a bad idea, though, in snake country like this. Well, let’s give the incinerator a new hat. Maybe it’s vain too. Want to brace the wheelbarrow?”

  “Sure,” he said, and I climbed up and tossed away the window screen that was on the chimney. Then I bent down the arms of my galvanized Greek cross till I had a square box open at one end. I worked it, open end down, into the chimney mouth, and that was all. I jumped down again. Some smoke began to come out of the right place.

  Rafael put his hands on his hips and rocked back and forth, looking up.

  “Goddam,” he said. “That all it take?”

  “That’s all. Now it won’t get clogged with soot.”

  He was so pleased he poured kerosene over the remaining parcels of garbage and threw them all into the furnace at once. Then he came back and sat on the wheelbarrow beside me. He had a healthy, sweaty smell, not like that funny perfume in the house or the smell in De Anza’s room.

  I took out cigarettes and we lit up.

  “Who lives here, anyway?” I asked. “Just the De Anzas and you and your wife?”

  “Nobody else.”

  “What about this guy that quit a couple of days ago? What was his name, Callahan?”

  “Sure. What about him?”

  “How long did he work here?”

  “Couple of months.”

  “What did he quit for? Or was he fired?”

  “Don’ know,” Rafael said thoughtfully, but this time I didn’t believe him. He was frowning at the desert.

  I let it drop.

  “How long have you been here, Rafe?”

  “Around two years. When the De Anzas come here, they buy these house and need somebody to take care of it. Me and Nita, we hear about it. Nita is damn good cook.”

  “How are they to work for—the De Anzas?”

  “All right,” he said, still frowning. “Is depend. We get along fine. Mr. De Anza don’t talk to me,” he added.

  “Why not?”

  “He just don’t see me much.”

  I thought that over.

  “He talk to Veence, though,” Rafael said. “Veence Callahan. There was one fella what worked here before Veence, last year. He stayed three months. Thing is, Nick, this funny place. You get used to it, fine. But this not the city. Different here. Look. Lizard. Yucca. Cactus. Fine for them. You come here, look for peach trees, roses, pretty birds, that no good. You not like it. But lizard and yucca—sure. Just get used to things. Fella live in the city, he watch traffic lights. Live in snow country, wear lot of clothes. You go on boat, Nick, you act different, no? You not hunt deer then. You not look round for taxi. Get used to boat, okay, fine—fish and the birds, but no deer, no jack rabbit. On ocean, you relax, get healthy, maybe, but better get used to fish. No fish here, except I tell you funny thing, Nick. You know what? This used to be ocean once.”

  “Did it?”

  “Whole damn desert. Sure. Fella tell me ’bout it. All the water go away long time ago, but the land it remember. It not land and it not sea, I guess. What you call the dry ocean—mar seco. You take it easy, don’t look for things you don’t get here, and you be fine. The desert is all dead. The clock don’t run here. Nobody does.”

  “It’s too hot for running.”

  “Some people try. No good, Nick. It’s one good place to sit and wait.” He looked at me sidewise. “Pero no hace nada. Veence, he couldn’t sit and wait. So—pchs!” He went on fast. “That incinerator look damn good now. I hope you stay.”

  I dropped my cigarette, stepped on it, and rubbed my eyes. “I’m sleepy. I’m sweating, too. Listen, Rafe, these are the only clothes I’ve got. I don’t want to look like a tramp when I see Mr. De Anza. Could I wash ’em out somewhere?”

  “Come on,” he said, getting up. “Nita gonna wash ’em.”

  “No, I can do—”

  “We got ’lectric washing machine. No trouble. Tell you, Nick, maybe we find something. I think Veence, he leave some clothes when he quit. He was ’bout your size.”

  Rafael started to push the wheelbarrow toward the garage, and I walked beside him. “What I need are shoes,” I said. “No matter how much I polish these, they won’t look good. Vince wouldn’t have left any shoes, would he?”

  “I dunno. Don’t think so.” Rafael grinned at me happily. “You take pair of my shoes, eh?”

  I looked down and laughed. Pointing his narrow toes delicately, he followed the wheelbarrow around the garage, strutting a little.

  “I get you fixed up, Nick,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

  He got me fixed up. I didn’t find out much more, because Rafael couldn’t do two things at one time, and whenever he started to talk he’d have to stop looking for Callahan’s old suit or a new razor blade or a clean shirt. Finally he stopped talking altogether and just grunted. That way, he got efficient as hell and half an hour later I had everything I needed. But then Rafael discovered he had some work to do, so he went off, telling me I might as well take a nap and he’d wake me if I was wanted. I said, “Bankers’ hours,” as he went out, but that didn’t call for an answer.

  He’d put me in a bedroom, and I never did find out whose it was. I guess it was an extra guest room. It had a private bath, anyway, and was across the patio from the rooms I’d seen before. The whole place was laid out in a casual way, it seemed to me, and the De Anzas lived just as casually. Apparently they just didn’t give a damn. From what I’d seen of Leopold De Anza—or would it be Leopoldo in Spanish?—I figured that merely the effort of eating his dinner would knock him out for twelve hours at least. The Countess was a horse of another color. De Anza might be burned out, the way Rafael had said, but Mrs. De Anza—she wasn’t. I couldn’t figure what she was doing in a place like this.

  She looked more like the Las Vegas or Reno type to me than a woman who’d settle down, and I mean settle down, in a desert ranch with only a half-dead husband and a king snake to keep her amused. Physically she looked burned out too, but I’m not talking about that.

  It was nothing to me. Rafael and Benita got along okay with the De Anzas. Vincent Callahan had quit, but there could have been plenty of reasons. Maybe he just didn’t like living in a dry ocean.

  I went through my rucksack, getting things in order. I found a few letters of reference I was keeping; they said I was able, willing, and honest, and stopped right there.

  Callahan’s suit fitted me pretty well, and though Rafael’s shirt was too loose at the neck and too short in the arms, it was a clean shirt, and, as a matter of fact, the soberest one of five he offered me. My shoes would have to do. I took them into the bathroom, spread a newspaper, and went to work with saddle soap. Afterward, with a hand mirror to help, I trimmed the back of my neck as well as I could, and tried to get some of the dirt from my nails.

  I stretched out on the bed. I started to open the window beside me, remembered the air conditioning, and didn’t. Instead, I shut my eyes and tried to go to sleep.

  Thinking about Sherry, I blanked out.

  Chapter 6

  I slept straight through till seven, when Rafael woke me and said I better get ready for dinner. That didn’t take me long, even though I fussed over the details. My shoes felt tight, but they looked a lot better. I’d had exactly the right amount of sleep. Just walking across the patio made me feel good. The air was still hot, but beginning to stir with coolness, and the sky was green, a sort of luminous stained-glass green with a light behind it. I could almost believe I really was at the bottom of the sea. It was nice to think about, because it made me feel cooler.

  I went in the kitchen, where Benita ignored me, and I said, “Thanks for washing that stuff for me. Á s
us órdenes.”

  She looked around and shrugged. I hadn’t expected anything else. I went on, covering ground that was beginning to be familiar, and reached the living room, though I felt more and more awkward with each step. It takes a while to get used to new clothes, and when they don’t even fit you, it’s worse. I found myself wishing I’d kept my old clothes on; at least they were a part of me, and I’d felt like myself in them.

  I’m sure the Countess wouldn’t have noticed what I wore. She was lying on a sofa, wearing a housecoat rucked up carelessly above her bare, bony knees. Either the housecoat was an antique or she washed it in lye. It looked awful. She had on leather sandals, with a strap loose and dangling, and she was loaded with costume jewelry, the heavy silver stuff with those blue and blue-green stones. And the blue turban, of course, so tight it must have given her a headache. She was working a puzzle in a book of crosswords. She lifted abstracted eyes, saw me without recognition, and went back to her puzzle.

  The room must have been aired out. That smelly perfume wasn’t noticeable tonight.

  Glass clinked. With his back to me, standing at a portable bar against the wall, was a tall man with glossy black hair. Between his hairline and collar was skin as pink-white as a baby’s. He had on a light blue coat and slacks and what looked like moccasins.

  The Countess said, “Leo, here’s Nick Banning.”

  De Anza turned around. He had the color and complexion of a sixteen-year-old boy. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a line or wrinkle in his face, not even around the eyes, where the skin can’t help wrinkling after you’ve looked at things long enough. But I couldn’t be too certain of that, because he was wearing glasses with horn rims and very dark lenses, so dark I couldn’t see his eyes at all. There weren’t any lines on his forehead or running down from his nose to the corners of his mouth. If it hadn’t been for that same aquiline nose, he could have posed for a Boy Scout poster.

  He wasn’t watching me; he was watching his wife. I saw that his hair wasn’t white at the roots any more, the way it had been when I’d seen him first in his bed. And, from this close, I could tell that he was made up. He’d got on rouge and maybe lipstick and pancake powder or whatever they call it.

  He wasn’t a fag, though. I felt pretty sure of that, somehow. And he wasn’t made up to look like a woman, either. He was just made up to look young, and he’d done a swell job. But his hands were a tip-off. They had brown spots and wrinkles, and the joints weren’t those of a kid.

  He turned his head a little and looked at me with those big round dark lenses. Probably there were eyes behind them. You’d never know it from looking. You’d never know he’d seen me before, either. We were meeting for the first time. It wasn’t up to me to make any moves. I waited. He waited. After a little I saw he’d decided to outwait me, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Now that I wanted the job, I didn’t feel quite so easy. The flat black lenses kept fixed on me calmly and coldly, like a tall insect’s eyes.

  Mrs. De Anza broke it up after too long a time had passed.

  “All right, Leo, say something,” she said, without looking up from her crossword puzzle. “Go through the motions, anyhow.”

  “You want to work here, Nick?” De Anza asked flatly.

  “I—yes, I do,” I said.

  “You know what sort of work you’d be expected to do?”

  “I think so. A little of everything, Mrs. De Anza told me.”

  “Then you don’t know,” he said.

  “I don’t?”

  “If she’d told you all she expects, you wouldn’t be here.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I looked over at Mrs. De Anza, but she was digging her pencil into the crossword page and she didn’t even glance up. I had a feeling like somebody caught in a crossfire. It didn’t have anything to do with me, as Nick Banning. The crossfire was between the Count and his wife. I just happened to be standing there. It was all away over my head.

  De Anza said, “Have you wondered at all why this job is available just now?”

  “It’s not my business.”

  “Bravo,” said the Countess, viciously erasing, her eyes on the page.

  “Nonsense,” De Anza said. “It’s a vital part of your business, if you decide to take this job. What’s happened to others could happen to you, couldn’t it?”

  “Callahan is buried under the incinerator,” the Countess said, her head still bent, her eyes on her work. “The man before him we fed to the pigs. Don’t let him rattle you, Nick. After all, who pays the bills around here?”

  The Count lifted his right hand and turned it around thoughtfully in front of his dark glasses. “If this hand were incapacitated, my dear,” he said, “nobody would pay the bills.”

  “All right, all right,” she said impatiently. “You drive into town for groceries tomorrow.”

  “I don’t deny we need a handyman,” the Count said, letting his hand drop. “I just doubt whether our friend here would be happy with all his duties.”

  “Who is?” Mrs. De Anza asked. “You?”

  For some reason this made the rouged cheeks get a little pinker around the edges of the rouge. As if she had expected this, the Countess lifted her eyes for the first time and looked directly at him. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Standing there between them, I didn’t feel like myself any more. I felt like all the long row of other guys who must have stood here, Callahan and the boys before him, all of us one faceless puppet jumping when the strings twitched between the Countess and the Count.

  I couldn’t tell who won. But after a while Mrs. De Anza hoisted her bony knees higher on the sofa, propped the crossword book and licked her pencil. She was looking at the page again when she said, “Speaking of money, I’ll need some if I go into town tomorrow. Write me a check, Leo.”

  “With pleasure, my dear,” he said. Then he suddenly forgot all about me and went back to the bar, where he picked up a filled glass and kept on going toward a chair. “Fix yourself a drink if you like,” he said to the air, and set down his own on one arm of the chair. On the other was something wrapped up in a towel. He unwrapped the towel, and there was a glittering little revolver with a bottle of oil and a brush and everything else needed to clean it. As near as I could tell, it was a .45, but no make I recognized. Anyway, I thought it was a special job, silver-mounted, silver every place there was room for it. When De Anza picked it up, I could see that on the butt an oval had been filed clean.

  He shook out the cartridges.

  I went over to him.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I guess I’ll skip the drink right now. I’ve got some letters of recommendation here. If you want to look at them.”

  He put a drop of oil in the right place.

  I held out the letters.

  He hesitated, but finally laid the gun down on the towel and took them. That was what I wanted. I sat down too, near him, and waited while he opened the letters one by one, very slowly, and read them slowly too. He didn’t say a word. His face didn’t change. The Countess, on the couch, ignored us both. I began to feel as though I weren’t there at all. Finally I concentrated on looking at the gun. It was a beautiful piece of metal. The silver work was good, but it didn’t add anything, for my money. I liked the lines of the gun itself. They did what they were supposed to do. They fitted. They were right. Maybe I wasn’t in the room, but the gun and I were real. The gun seemed a lot more real than either of the two De Anzas, just then.

  At last the Count held out the letters to me. I took them. He went back to working on the revolver. I glanced toward Mrs. De Anza. She wasn’t paying any attention.

  I said, “Do I get the job?”

  “Decisions shouldn’t be made in a hurry, should they?” he asked. “Have you thought this over?”

  “There isn’t much to think over,” I said. “A job means a salary. I could use a salary. That’s the way I feel about it.”


  “Some jobs aren’t worth the salary,” he said, “and some salaries aren’t worth the job. Those recommendations of yours don’t say very much, do they?”

  “No doubt he wrote them himself,” the Countess said unexpectedly.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “If I had, I’d have written better ones, wouldn’t I?”

  “Only if you were clever enough,” she said, and went back to her crossword.

  “She’s joking,” De Anza told me. “I suppose. The real point is, we know nothing about you, and you know nothing about us. We’d both be buying a pig in a poke, wouldn’t we?”

  “If you want to ask any questions, I’ll answer them,” I said.

  De Anza bent over the gun.

  “Have you ever worked with the mentally ill?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “My God,” said the Countess. “And you call yourself experienced. Every modern college has a course in the care and feeding of schizophrenics, these days. Seminars in paresis. We’ll have to give you an orientation course, Nick. We’ll start you off easily, on the baby—the two-headed cretin. Sing him to sleep with ‘Oh, Little Town of Bedlam.’”

  “Irene—” De Anza said.

  “Yes, Leo?”

  “We wouldn’t want Nick quitting like Callahan, would we?”

  There was a little pause. The Countess lifted her head and looked steadily at De Anza.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  “It’s better to get everything clear in advance, then.”

  “Get what clear?” she asked. “I told Nick I’d been in an insane asylum once. So my reputation’s made. You can relax.”

  “Is that all you told him?”

  “Yes,” the Countess said, showing her teeth in a smile. “I said you could relax.”

  De Anza suddenly snapped the cylinder back into the revolver. He laid it on the towel, his dark glasses reflecting patches of lamplight.

  He said, in a low, flat voice, “I’m responsible for Mrs. De Anza’s actions, legally. There is no question of psychosis any more, of course. But these matters are complicated. You see my position, I’m sure. I must—well, I can take no chances.”