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  “We ain’t gonna pull you out lessen you hire us,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “Looky here.” Mrs. Rasmussen brandished weaponlike, the handle of the pump that had come off in her hand.

  “All right,” Mr. Gates practically sobbed, “you can stay here as caretakers. But no pay. And you’ll have to pay your own utilities.”

  Swift silent communication took place between the three.

  “But you give us the privilege of keeping whatever we can make off the land here, is that understood?” Miss Tinkham said.

  “After you clean it up,” he replied. “You’ve got to shut up that Board of Health before anything. After that, I don’t care too much what you do so long as you don’t ask me for anything and don’t bring the police down on me. Now get me out of here, if you can.”

  The three ladies hauled Mr. Gates out promptly and Mrs. Rasmussen made primitive efforts to brush his clothing off.

  Miss Tinkham and Mrs. Feeley put their heads together: “Where and how do you propose to obtain twenty-seven cats?”

  “Ain’t no trick to it at all,” Mrs. Feeley whispered. “Guess we gotta take this feller home.”

  “After acquiring this estate rent free, it would seem the sporting thing to do,” Miss Tinkham said. “He doesn’t realize what he has given away. The possibilities for income are splendid. My brain is racing already.”

  “Yeah. Don’t seem like our cornscience would let us sleep nights gettin’ away so cheap. We’ll be rollin’ in it in no time,” Mrs. Feeley chuckled. “Save up our money and build back the Ark! I been thinkin’ of a good way lately, won’t cost us hardly nothin’ an’ be classy, too!”

  “Mr. Gates had better direct Old-Timer,” Miss Tinkham said as the three ladies crawled up into the back of the truck.

  “We gotta take notice good,” Mrs. Rasmussen said, “to see whichaway is the easiest way to get here, so we don’t waste no time movin’.”

  “My car is back at the office,” Mr. Gates said. “If you’ll follow the old road to La Mesa, and then turn back to your right to Highway 99, you’ll come to Five Points and then you’re right in front of the place.”

  “We should have something in writing,” Miss Tinkham said. “The Public Utilities people can be pretty stuffy about these things.” She was determined to get something signed before another twenty-four hours rolled around. There had been an ugly little doubt nagging at her ever since Otho Fikes had gone off and left his valuable truck with them without leaving his certificate of ownership or even his address. It would be better to keep her doubts to herself and trust to their luck. Suppose they had to reach him before tonight for one reason or another? National City was a crowded place, and they’d never find him.

  “Yeah. We need a paper,” Mrs. Feeley said, “case anybody come around givin’ us any static.”

  “I’ll go up and turn on the lights at the head of the stairs,” Mr. Gates said. “Just park the truck anywhere.” He gestured into the darkness. “The streets are deserted this time of night.”

  “Not a very prosperous neighborhood,” Miss Tinkham whispered to her friends. Small two-story buildings housed those odd little business enterprises that she had often noticed, never seeing any customers go in or out, scarcely ever seeing them lit up, and always wondering how such establishments managed to pay their rent.

  Mrs. Feeley beckoned to Old-Timer, who was walking up and down beside the truck. “Never hurts to have a man along,” she said.

  Mr. Gates sat at his battered typewriter while Miss Tinkham read his diploma, fly specks and all. Old-Timer discovered a brass spittoon and took a plug of chewing tobacco out of his hip pocket.

  “He wouldn’t a done that if he had a beer,” Mrs. Rasmussen whispered.

  Mrs. Feeley swallowed hard and nodded.

  “But it’s worth it,” she said watching as Miss Tinkham gave Mr. Gates the necessary vital statistics. “We flat stole that place. We can pay for his truck in no time when we start growin’ that garden stuff.”

  “This covers the situation, including your part as exterminators as well as caretakers,” Mr. Gates said, handing Miss Tinkham the folded document. “I put in that if either party wants to make a change, they should give sixty days notice. That’s fair to both, don’t you…”

  A loud buckling crash, the sound of splintering glass and a roaring engine, followed by the sound of grinding gears and squealing tires put a stop to all human sound. It came clearly through the tightly closed windows of the law office.

  “Sounded close by,” Mr. Gates reached for his hat.

  “Somebody lost the set out of their ring,” Mrs. Feeley quipped, but suddenly her eyes froze on Miss Tinkham’s. Mrs. Rasmussen and Old-Timer were already on their feet.

  “Blood an’ guts all over the street, or I miss my guess,” Mrs. Feeley said. “C’mon!”

  The beautiful red truck was knocked half way into the street, the whole left side of the cab bent in, the door glass smashed, and the fenders almost on the ground.

  Not a soul nor a sign of a car was in sight.

  “I’ll call the police.” Mr. Gates was the first to speak. “Probably those drag racers, those hot-rod kids that infest this neighborhood. Almost no regular traffic through here at this hour.”

  Mrs. Feeley stood petrified between him and the stairs.

  “I don’t b’lieve we wanna call the police,” she said dazedly. “They ain’t nobody here to arrest but us.”

  “We’ll turn the other cheek this time,” Miss Tinkham said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  Old-Timer was trembling like a wet dog.

  “Then I hope you’re insured,” Mr. Gates said, not unkindly. “But the smash must be reported. They can trace hit-and-run drivers. It’s obstructing the law if you don’t.”

  “What we need right now is the wrecker to tow us away,” Miss Tinkham said. “Police investigation can come later.”

  “See if she’ll start first.” Mrs. Rasmussen shoved Old-Timer gently towards the truck.

  He walked around to the unbattered side and pried open the door that was jammed shut from the shock. Moving almost fearfully, they watched him turn on the ignition and press the starter. He squared back his shoulders at the encouraging noise he made as he tested out the various gears. The brake lights glowed reassuringly when he stepped on the brake.

  “Sure thanks,” Mrs. Feeley said to Mr. Gates, “but we gotta be goin’.”

  “Going to be a big expense,” Mr. Gates said. “I hope it’s paid for.”

  “It’s not,” Miss Tinkham waved sadly.

  “It ain’t even ours,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “But we’ll take good care o’ your place, don’t you never fear,” Mrs. Feeley said solemnly, seeing the signed paper that stuck out of Miss Tinkham’s pocket.

  Mr. Gates scratched his left ear in a puzzled manner as Mrs. Feeley and Mrs. Rasmussen got into the back of the mashed truck and drove off slowly and noisily. After a block or two, Old-Timer turned quickly into an alley. The two in the back of the truck crouched down, and Miss Tinkham, who had automatically taken her place in the front beside Old-Timer in case fluent explanations were required in short order, pulled her neck down lower inside her sweater. Old-Timer lifted mightily on the left front fender and then on the back one. After that, he proceeded straight ahead down the alley with far less noise than before.

  “Them fenders was draggin’ on the wheels,” Mrs. Feeley whispered.

  By some celestial navigation of his own, Old-Timer found many deserted side streets. When the main artery became inevitable, he cannily drove with the crushed left side of the truck next to the cars in the left-hand lane. By keeping to the middle lane until turns became necessary, the shattered body was reasonably well concealed from traffic policemen.

  “All hell’s gonna bust loose, now,” Mrs. Feeley said to Miss Tinkham in front. “Right here in town one of them bulls is gonna cruise up an’ start astin’ questions for sure.”

  “Our luck may j
ust hold,” Miss Tinkham said. “There is a political rally in the Park tonight. One of the presidential candidates is making a speech, and the local constabulary may all be out there. Whoever he is, Democrat or Republican, I say God bless him.”

  Holding their breaths as they rounded the corner, they slid as quietly as possible into their own front yard and parking lot unmolested by anyone. Mrs. Feeley climbed out first and wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand. “Find out who’s doin’ the spielin’ out there tonight,” she said. “That’s the feller I’m votin’ for.”

  “Me, too,” Mrs. Rasmussen said fervently.

  “Millions of Americans will be voting for a President without any such strong reason as ours,” Miss Tinkham sighed as she climbed down and they all surveyed the wreckage.

  “We’ll have to buy it now,” she said.

  Tears were rolling slowly down Mrs. Rasmussen’s face: “It was me that thought o’ tryin’ the truck out first. If only…”

  “If only yer grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wheelbarrow!” Mrs. Feeley put her arm around her. “Ain’t a thing wrong with it that money can’t fix.”

  Old-Timer surveyed his shattered dream with a wing-fallen sadness.

  Miss Tinkham touched him on the arm: “We all walked away from it, and that’s all that matters, Old-Timer.”

  “There’s cold beer in the icebox,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “Gawd,” Mrs. Feeley cried, “wasn’t it good we didn’t have no beer in the truck? Havin’ to creep home thataway an’ maybe gettin’ pulled by the law? Wouldn’t that a tore it? Cheer up, man! The worst is yet to come, I always say.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen picked a small paper up from under the door of their bus-house. She handed it to Miss Tinkham, who fished up her lorgnette and hastily polished it between her fingers.

  “You wasn here. If you stove-up my truck, you will have to ficks it wrigh away. Be back tomoro. Otho Fikes.” She read the note aloud.

  Mrs. Rasmussen brought out eight frosty cans of beer. On this occasion one can of beer wouldn’t last any longer than a snowflake in hell. When the second can was gulped down, she produced big wedges of Monterey jack cheese. “Just to stay you,” she said.

  Mrs. Feeley belched resoundingly, and then in coloratura.

  “What is it Danny’s always sayin’? ‘Many a headache, but never a dull moment’? Wonder how Fikes’ll take what we done to his truck?”

  “We will f-i-c-k-s it,” Miss Tinkham spelled it out, “but, of course, it will take longer that way.”

  Chapter 4

  NOBODY at the Ark slept late the next morning, even though it was Sunday, usually a very dreamy, leisurely kind of Sabbath. Mrs. Rasmussen carried out a big bowl of steaming rich coffee to the side of the truck where she was sure she would find Old-Timer. Overnight his face seemed to have sprung a thousand little wrinkles. The door slammed and Mrs. Feeley came out in blue jeans and red checkered shirt. She blew noisily on her coffee.

  “Things don’t never look so bad in the daylight,” she said. “Long’s the engine ain’t rurnt.”

  “There’s ham an’ grits an’ hot biscuits.” Mrs. Rasmussen apparently felt like atoning for her share in the accident. “An’ bananas, fried-like, with cinnamon sticks grated on ’em an’ little chips o’ lemon rind.”

  “Ambrosia,” Miss Tinkham trilled from the steps. “Mrs. Rasmussen’s Sunday breakfasts seem to give one a new lease on life. They comfort the inner man and make us ready for whatever may come.”

  She had set out the cheery fiesta-pottery dishes on a coarse ecru Mexican tablecloth that Mrs. Rasmussen was very partial to. And the zinnias in their copper bowl never disappointed anybody! Miss Tinkham swirled her ornate patio dress happily. She always liked to feel at one with her surroundings.

  When the four were about to sit down, Mrs. Rasmussen turned from the radio where she was dialing to get her favorite Polka Party music. “I forgot: red-eye or milk gravy?” While her friends debated, she went over to the stove and made both kinds.

  “You fair got us spoiled,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “A feller wants what he wants.” Mrs. Rasmussen doled out good big slices of ham and puffy fried eggs that looked like golden-centered double daisies.

  “She b’lieves in goin’ to hell in a hansom cab.” Mrs. Feeley took two.

  “It ain’t nothin’ but the middle slices o’ one o’ them sliced picnic shoulders. Don’t cost hardly nothin’…an’ we may be in for a long dry spell,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “There is no way to predict the future. My crystal ball seems to have gone on strike. We would do well to fatten our humps,” Miss Tinkham said as she split open a small, high, feathery biscuit.

  “Fatten our rumps, that’s good!” Mrs. Feeley giggled.

  “Humps,” Miss Tinkham said, “as the dromedaries do when they get a chance to eat well. Then they live off the fat of their humps when starvation times come.”

  “Lotsa women could live off that fat of their rump,” Mrs. Feeley insisted. “Some of ’em ten, twelve years maybe.” She knew that her own round Saint Nicholas belly had cost her twenty-five cents a can, but all the same she was proud that she had a neat, hard little butt herself or she never would wear britches all the time.

  “We all sure had some poor body’s blessin’ last night,” she sighed as she spooned up creamy grits and made a flat place in the middle of the heap. She took a lump of butter and stirred it in. Then she poured in a spoonful of red-eye gravy. “I’ll just have a little milk gravy on my eggs. Ain’t nothin’ gonna hurt us too much long as we got Mrs. Rasmussen for Chief Cook. I swear you the best cook I ever et after.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen flushed with pleasure.

  “It’s the infinite pains she takes about the smallest things,” Miss Tinkham said. “Nothing is ever too much trouble for her.”

  “They ain’t no short cuts to cookin’,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Have another slice o’ ham.” She piled one on Old-Timer’s plate and added a large helping of the sautéed bananas. “Kinly be like dessert.”

  “Lookit me,” Mrs. Feeley bared her gums, “no more teeth than a hen, but they ain’t no gristle nor striffin’ in Mrs. Rasmussen’s meat. After a shock like we had last night, I didn’t think I’d close an eye but I slept like a felled ox. Breakfast like this an’ we can forget all about that bashed car. Somepin’ wrong with me.” She took three more hot biscuits, buttered them on their separate little plate, and poured sorghum molasses over them. “I can’t figger it out: I can’t get excited about who done it! Must be gettin’ too much fresh air or somepin’ lately. I don’t even care if we never find out! Just pay for the damages an’ go on from there.”

  “It was such a blessing that Old-Timer was not sitting in the truck,” Miss Tinkham said. “I think our sense of relief at no one being hurt has wiped out every other feeling.”

  “An’ nobody blamin’ nobody.” Mrs. Rasmussen’s eyes filled with a look of almost unbearable love for her friends.

  Miss Tinkham reached out her plate. “I’ll just have another tiny slice of that ham, if you please,” she said. “This golden combination may never happen again.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen brightened at once and her smile dried the mist in her eyes: “The time to take hot cakes is when they’re passed!”

  Miss Tinkham nodded. “And if, by some remote possibility of accident, we go to heaven when we die, think of the aeons of milk and honey we shall have to endure! For my part I am going to stock up on the more substantial viands while I can!”

  “Purty watery diet,” Mrs. Feeley agreed.

  “Not nearly so bad as manna, perish the thought,” Miss Tinkham chuckled.

  “They say the Bible’s full o’ manna, but I don’t rightly know what it is,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “Sounds too fluffy to me,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “The only thing it suggests to me,” Miss Tinkham said, “is a nasty, hard kind of marshmallow candy we used to buy when I was a girl. There were candies about the s
ize of your hand shaped like girls riding bicycles, and locomotives, all horribly pink or apricot-colored, and the more we chewed the fuller our mouths seemed to be of the spongy, puffy pap. Manna!” She shuddered and took two more hot biscuits.

  “We ain’t likely to be eatin’ none o’ that,” Mrs. Feeley said. “More likely we’ll be passin’ coal down below.”

  “And eating roast heretic!” Miss Tinkham smiled.

  “Yeah…if that Fikes starts poppin’ off,” Mrs. Feeley said, “we’ll take care o’ him. Dunno just when we’ll get through with it, but he’ll be paid.”

  “Eventually,” Miss Tinkham sighed gently, thinking of the lovely antiques they could have purchased with eight hundred dollars, not to mention the innumerable secondhand books and cases of beer they could have bought with the money that would now go to the Body Shop. “For the truck must be refinished,” she said. “A man cannot live with a battered dream.”

  “Wonder if they’re open on Sunday?” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  Old-Timer shook his head.

  “Since we was kinda shook up,” Mrs. Feeley said, “we’d orta take it easy today. Start goin’ through our plunder an’ settin’ aside what we gonna take with us. You’ll want your ’lectric stove.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen’s brow puckered.

  “Tooner Schooner paid twelve dollars for some kinda special wire to make it work. You can’t just plug it in like the Refrigidaire. We could take it with, an’ not use it. Cook on the range. But we can’t do without the ice…” She paused and then smiled. “Maybe we won’t be havin’ much beer to keep cold. Not till we kin see daylight.”

  “Aw, we ain’t never starved a winter yet,” Mrs. Feeley said. “I gotta go round up my ol’ garden tools.”

  “What about the cats?” Miss Tinkham said.

  “Say!” Mrs. Feeley clapped her hands. “That’s fine! Sunday, an’ lotsa people won’t be home. Ol’-Timer, go get a grass sack!”

  “Are you going to…to ‘liberate’ them?” Miss Tinkham asked.