Let's go For Broke Page 8

  “No bed, nor any place to put one,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “No door, an’ all them hobos around! An’ I ain’t scared o’ the devil hisself, but I’d be nervis here,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “No water, no place to cook,” Mrs. Rasmussen said, then smiled. “We ain’t got no water neither.”

  “But, Lord, we got a mansion an’ a fire an’ two cars an’ land…C’mon, N. Carnation: get your gear together. You’re goin’ with us.” Mrs. Feeley tried to make gestures of packing. The little woman looked at Miss Tinkham questioningly.

  “Nuestra casa es suya,” she said, blessing Katy for having insisted that they learn certain idioms by rote. There was something to be said for polite formulas, after all. “Llevar…ah, cosas.” She did wish she had studied harder!

  Encarnación hesitated a moment. Mrs. Rasmussen lifted a cotton sweater off a nail and laid it over the woman’s arm.

  “Vamoose,” she said kindly.

  Encarnación looked briefly at the pile of grass sacks on the floor of the box.

  Mrs. Feeley shook her head: “No wayno.”

  There were a few tin cans for cooking and a sheet of galvanized tin on three bricks near the door. No need to take that stove!

  “Momentito.” Encarnación lifted up a grass sack that was nailed to the wall. From under it she brought a small lithograph of San Martín Caballero, mounted on a horse, cutting his cape in half with his sword to share his cloak with a beggar.

  “Mi San Martín,” she said, resigned and ready.

  Mrs. Feeley picked up two of the flower pots and Miss Tinkham and Mrs. Rasmussen brought the others.

  As they stopped at the last traffic light before Five Points, Miss Tinkham saw a big sign: ANTIQUES FOR SALE. GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.

  “Do let’s go in!” she cried.

  “What would you use for money?” Mrs. Feeley inquired.

  “That’s the only safe time to go antiqueing,” Miss Tinkham said, “when you can’t possibly buy anything.” Old-Timer drew up to the curb obligingly and Miss Tinkham sailed in followed by Mrs. Rasmussen.

  A short, fat man with a beret sat on a packing box eating a dill pickle disconsolately. “Too late,” he waved them off. “Got to vacate in the morning. All the stuff’s in the boxes, and no place to store ’em. I’m going to move to the trailer park. Sorry, folks.”

  “What would you pay us to store it for you?” Miss Tinkham asked.

  “Where?” the man asked.

  “We live in the red stone mansion behind the high hedge at Five Points. We have the truck outside.” Miss Tinkham had seen a couple of Chinese vases big enough for Ali Baba and the forty thieves to hide in.

  “Save you the haulin’ cost,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “You in the business?”

  “Not at the moment,” Miss Tinkham said airily, “but we may be within a few days. We have the perfect atmosphere for it…”

  “Make me an offer for the lot,” the owner said.

  “A pig in a poke?” Miss Tinkham smiled. “No, thank you. We’ll store it for you at a moderate fee, less than the warehouse. You’d have to give us something in advance.”

  The owner was obviously not thrilled at parting with cash. “How’d you like to take it on consignment?” he said.

  Mrs. Rasmussen wrinkled her brow.

  “We’ll do it for fifty per cent,” Miss Tinkham said. “Have you got an inventory?”

  “Hell, lady, what’s there is there! Inventory, she says! We gotta start trusting each other somewheres! I’m trusting you to sell what’s in there, and trusting you to give me half of everything you get! Looks to me like I’m doing all the trusting. You might take it away and I’d never see you or the stuff again. What have you got to lose?”

  “My good man, truer words were never spoken. Load the truck.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen went out to get Old-Timer and Mrs. Feeley.

  “No books,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “How do you know?” the owner asked.

  “The boxes are bulky, but not heavy.” Miss Tinkham looked carefully into the big Chinese vases: “Anyone been sick in these lately?” Finding them safe, she and Mrs. Feeley carried them out to the truck.

  “I never said nothin’ for fear o’ queerin’ the deal,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “He has to be out by tomorrow morning, so he’s letting us sell the stuff for half of what we get,” Miss Tinkham explained. “Where shall we find you?” She turned to the owner, who fished out a greasy business card.

  “Sunset Trailer Court,” he said. “It’s not far. Just ask for Ben Hur Grossman. Where do I find you?”

  “Drive in the only private driveway at Five Points intersection. We’ll have a sign out by the time there’s any need for you to call. But we should appreciate anything in the way of prospects you could pass on to us. It is to our mutual advantage.”

  “For you, lady, I’ll do it,” Ben Hur Grossman left her to tack up a card on the door giving his new address.

  “At least he isn’t moving out owing anyone,” Miss Tinkham whispered. “He’d never leave his address.”

  A somewhat dazed group of people got back into the truck. Even Miss Tinkham couldn’t quite understand the coup. Suddenly Mrs. Feeley began to laugh wildly: “You know, Miss Tinkham, there’d orter be a law agin you!”

  “Why?” Miss Tinkham giggled.

  “Cause you’d a been the finest con artist the world ever seen if you’d a wanted to! I believe you could walk off with the Golden Gate Bridge in your pocket if you wanted it.”

  “An’ she didn’t even bother to wear no black silk handkerchef, neither,” Mrs. Rasmussen chuckled appreciatively.

  “Ben Hur will never regret it,” Miss Tinkham said modestly. “Our little guest’s arrival precipitated a crisis…and obviously, something had to be done. It all seemed so fortuitous, the hand of fate pointing the way by having us stop at that particular traffic light. Be flying in the face of providence not to follow through.”

  “I could sure use a beer,” Mrs. Rasmussen said as they drove slowly into the driveway not to jar the merchandise. “I second that emotion,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “Ain’t it lucky we had five o’ them potatoes?” Mrs. Rasmussen whispered, “I stuff a frankfurter in each of ’em ’fore I bake ’em. That’s why I call ’em Spudniks: ’cause they got a dog inside of ’em. Get it?”

  Encarnación was cowering back in the seat not saying a word.

  Miss Tinkham took her hand and made her get down.

  “Leave the lights on, Ol’-Timer, till I find the candles,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  By the time the boxes were unloaded and the tubs and buckets of water set safely covered in the kitchen, Mrs. Rasmussen had lit three candles, poked up the fire in the stove, and had set the greens to boil now that she had water. Encarnación sat on a box looking around her in awed admiration. Mrs. Rasmussen got out five bottles of beer and the company drew nearer the stove.

  “This ain’t real cold. Reckon she likes beer?” Mrs. Rasmussen passed a bottle to Encarnación.

  “She don’t look crazy to me,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  They raised their bottles and smiled at her:

  “Muchas gracias. Salud!” Encarnación smiled briefly for the first time.

  “Chinguy!” Mrs. Feeley cried in her version of a Spanish expression she had picked up from the marimba players in Tijuana. “Damn if I don’t b’lieve she’s got every one o’ her teeth!”

  Miss Tinkham got a plastic tablecloth out of a carton and began to lay the table. Encarnación followed her like a puppy, trying to be helpful. The dingy kitchen did not seem so bleak in the candlelight and the warmth of the woodfire was comforting. The ladies were strangely silent as they worked. Mrs. Rasmussen opened the cooler cupboard where she had the small store of beer and food put away. She changed her mind and closed the door again. It certainly looked like a long, dry spell ahead. Be short rations even without taking in another mouth to feed, but that piano-box resid
ence had really set them back on their heels. She looked up at the small narrow kitchen windows with stout iron bars over them and was grateful for the general feeling of protection and well-being the big old house gave her. A feeling like that was made to be shared. She banged on the window with a spoon to get Old-Timer to come in to supper.

  The Spudniks were smoking hot and the little saucers of greens smelled appetizing. Mrs. Rasmussen had toasted some slices of bread in a little bacon fat on top of the stove to give it more “suction.”

  The five sat down and looked around at each other.

  “It ain’t much,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “Gawd knows you’re welcome to it,” Mrs. Feeley said to Encarnación.

  The little woman sliced across her potato the way Miss Tinkham did.

  “Provecho!” she said.

  “She means ‘May it do you good!’” Miss Tinkham said. “I always say, ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’”

  Mrs. Feeley looked up from her greens: “I never have figured out what it was that stalled the ox.”

  Miss Tinkham decided that the difficulties of communication with their guest were great enough without having to attempt a translation of her remarks about the fact that animal husbandry was known in Bible times. “I’ll dig out my Spanish dictionary tomorrow,” she said, “and perhaps we can talk to Encarnación a little more fully, but right now I am simply exhausted as all of us are after a long, tiring day.”

  Mrs. Rasmussen scraped the dishes and piled them in a pan.

  “No use to waste water,” she said. “Do ’em all at oncet tomorra.”

  Mrs. Feeley went outside and came back carrying two cats by the scruff of the neck.

  “They can be the watchdogs tonight,” she said. “Keep them rats an’ mice off’n us.” The cats stalked about sniffing at corners, holding their tails high. One of them began licking the plates in the dishpan. Mrs. Rasmussen knocked him off the pan with the back of her hand and set a breadboard on top of the dishpan:

  “Eat the mice!” she scolded. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Miss Tinkham spread up the army cot with the foam-rubber pad on it for Encarnación. She put a cotton blanket on it and a seersucker spread. Then she got a towel and one of her own crocheted washrags from her bedroom; also a little cake of new soap. On the orange crate beside the bed she put a basin full of water from the precious supply. Mrs. Rasmussen had poured a little warm water from the teakettle. With a figured batiste nightgown over her arm and a short terrycloth beachcoat she had purchased at the Thrift Shop but never worn, she took Encarnación by the hand and led her into her bedroom. She handed her her own precious flashlight in case the little woman woke up frightened at being in a strange place.

  The beach coat came down almost to Encarnación’s ankles and made a fine bathrobe.

  “Bonita,” Encarnación murmured.

  “Buenas noches.” Miss Tinkham smiled and waved from the door. She pointed to herself and then put her folded hands against her cheek before she closed the door.

  “Diós se lo pague,” Encarnación said.

  “She says ‘God will repay you,’” Miss Tinkham told Mrs. Rasmussen, as they went to say goodnight to Mrs. Feeley. They knew where they would find her. The moonlight coming through the glass dome of the conservatory made even the bare greenhouse look glamorous.

  “Just imagine how it will be when she has flowers in it!” Miss Tinkham said.

  Mrs. Feeley had already brought in Encarnación’s pots of flowers and tucked them in safely for the night.

  “Man,” Mrs. Feeley sighed, “we sure got everything in the world here. They just ain’t nothin’ we can’t do here if we’re a mind to!”

  “The potential is indeed great,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “What we oughta start is one o’ them Junior League Thrift Shops,” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “Along with the antiques, we could manage it beautifully,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “I’m gonna sell flowers,” Mrs. Feeley said. “Big, purty ones with big fat red hearts tied onto ’em!”

  “Hearts and flowers,” Miss Tinkham laughed. “We’ll have Muzak play that over and over as your theme song.”

  “Flowers without hearts onto ’em don’t seem natcherl,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “It will be your trademark,” Miss Tinkham agreed.

  “Ol’-Timer dug up about a thousand big night crawlers,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Lotsa money in night crawlers.”

  “Oldest profession in the world,” Miss Tinkham laughed. “But fishermen will buy them, no doubt.”

  “Yessir,” Mrs. Rasmussen dreamed aloud, “Junior League Thrift Shop, Hearts an’ Flowers, an’ Oriental Worm Ranch!”

  “Oriental?” Miss Tinkham said.

  Mrs. Rasmussen nodded: “Sounds like more.”

  “Sure elegant,” Mrs. Feeley said, “but we ain’t got no job for N. Carnation.”

  “We could dress her up like an Aztec princess and let her sell hot tamales,” Miss Tinkham said.

  “She’ll think o’ somethin’,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Them wiry little people is good at lots o’ things.”

  The three turned into the hall; Mrs. Feeley looked back over her shoulder, reluctant to leave her dream world: “I could look at it all night, but I’m too tired to say sooey to a hog!”

  Chapter 7

  “COMFORTIN’ THING to find the fire still goin’,” Mrs. Rasmussen said as she poured the boiling water into the drip coffeepot. She had stirred the coals in the old range into a fine fire in no time at all. The cool morning of California, especially in the old stone house, so dark and damp from long vacancy, made the fire doubly welcome. Mrs. Feeley was trying to let some light in through one of the small windows of the kitchen by scrubbing the panes with wet, wadded-up newspaper. Miss Tinkham was covering the seats of two old chairs she had found on the porch with bits of board and old cushions.

  “Better than just sitting on our fine, imported fruitwood furniture…apple crates and orange boxes.” She smiled. “Old-Timer must have been exploring the carriage house…I can see the top of his straw hat over the tops of the guava bushes. He’s coming up the path now.” He moved rather faster than usual and was playing a doleful dirge on a foot-long harmonica.

  “Fine way to start the day off!” Mrs. Feeley laughed, “playin’ the ‘Dead March’!”

  Old-Timer gestured with his head in the direction of the carriage house, never missed a note of the “Funeral March,” and turned back the way he came with the ladies at his heels.

  When they entered the building, part of the floor gave way, rotten as punk. Ol’-Timer pushed back a sliding door of a separate compartment and winked. Everyone was silent for several seconds.

  “Bless God if it ain’t a hearse,” Mrs. Feeley said at last. Mrs. Rasmussen gazed awestruck at the carved, once gilded frame and the glass sides of the vehicles. “Not a crack in the glass anywhere,” Miss Tinkham said. The shafts rested in the ground in front of it. They seemed to be in perfect condition. The driver’s seat was firm, covered in ancient leather, just a little above the shafts, mounted on a low kind of box, carved with tassels. “All we need now,” Miss Tinkham said, “is a jeweled unicorn.”

  “I thought they used a horse. Wouldn’t a horse be better?” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “T. S. Eliot says,” Miss Tinkham continued, “‘And jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse…’”

  “If there’s anythin’ I like, it’s a hearse,” Mrs. Feeley said jovially.

  “Why on earth?” Miss Tinkham said.

  “’Cause if I can see it, I ain’t in it!”

  “You’ve got a point there,” Miss Tinkham agreed.

  “What’ll we do with it?” Mrs. Rasmussen said.

  “We’ll think o’ somethin’,” Mrs. Feeley said. “Let’s have our coffee an’ see what become o’ N. Carnation.”

  “Lucky the antique dealers didn’t run onto the hearse wh
en they were looting the place,” Miss Tinkham said. “I can see endless possibilities for it…once we have a horse, or a unicorn, to draw it. Handy if we were fleeing for our lives after nuclear bombing when there was no gasoline.”

  “Wonder what kinda man this joker was that built this here mansion?” Mrs. Feeley mused as they walked back to the house through the junglelike growth of brambles, bushes, shrubs, and fruit-trees gone wild.

  “Obviously an eccentric,” Miss Tinkham said, “someone who had a penchant for things. The hearse, for instance, and the iron stag on the lawn. In my imagination I see a man, say, from some mining city or industrial city like Pittsburgh or Youngstown, who got money late in life. Plenty of money and very little taste. Judging by the cistern and pump in the kitchen, the antiquated heating devices, the geyser in the bathroom, and the type of plumbing in general, I would guess that he came here for the climate. He built in about 1908 or -9, wanted to retain as much of his former way of life as possible, and then went wild in the local nurseries. He must have bought and planted some of every variety of fruit and flower known to Southern California…”

  “You’re dead-right, there,” Mrs. Feeley said. “Them lemon trees is over forty years old…and the oranges has been froze down and gone back to the old sour oranges they were grafted on. Look at the grapevines…thicker’n a churn. Them strawberry guavas is slow growers an’ they’re near about eight inches through the trunk now.”

  “He liked chickens and rabbits,” Miss Tinkham said. “For a few moments the first day, I thought the roof of the carriage house was white and green marble…”

  “Nothin’ but the pigeons,” Mrs. Feeley said as she looked up at the teeming dovecote over the main door to the carriage house.

  “Lotsa people pay high for squabs,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Me, I don’t like ’em.”

  “Me neither,” Mrs. Feeley said, “the meat’s too un-growed-like. No suction to it.”

  “Like baby veal,” Miss Tinkham said. “But the squabs may come in handy. I’ll wake our guest.” Somehow she had not expected such a wiry little woman to be a late sleeper. And already Mrs. Feeley’s corruption of her name had begun to stick. “It’s a losing battle,” Miss Tinkham smiled to herself as she went down the cobwebby hall, “for Mrs. Feeley has divided it into two names, N. Carnation. I’m afraid that’s how we’ll always think of her.”