Face on the Wall (31 page)

“Oh, Homer, for heaven's sake,” said Mary. “We can't abandon her now.”

This time the pugnacious president of the demolition company meant business. Following his beckoning finger, the operator of the huge grappling machine floundered around Annie's house to the south side. A small crowd of newspeople and photographers trailed after him, along with a horde of Annie's friends, relatives, and camp followers.

Things looked bad. The driver of the machine had a thick bull neck and an expressionless face. Homer suspected he would flatten anything in his path if the boss gave the order—a herd of sheep, a flock of children. His giant grappling machine lurched and swiveled across Annie's lawn, leaving deep gouges in the grass. When he pulled a handle in front of his knees, the Caterpillar track on the left side churned around, its heavy plates driven by a roller and a chain of sprocket-driven wheels. The excavator with its massive toothed jaw careened in a quarter-circle until it faced the four tall windows on the south side of Annie's house.

For a moment the operator sat unmoving in the shimmying seat. The sun shone straight into the house from halfway up the sky, illuminating Aesop's sandaled feet, Charles Dodgson's small black boots, and Little Red Riding Hood in the jaws of the wolf. Annie herself was nowhere to be seen.

The sun shone on something else, a large wooden object. “What the hell is that?” said Robert Gast.

“It's O'Dougherty's,” said Mary Kelly. “It's the roof from the back of his truck. Annie's inside it.”

“Oh my God.” Bob Gast shook his head in disbelief. The preposterous presence of a crazy piece of a ridiculous truck inside his deranged tenant's living room was just another surrealistic detail in what had become a continuing nightmare. Gast's stomach was in a constant state of convulsion. His hair fell out in handfuls. This morning his wife had stared at him and voiced her shock. “I never thought I'd be married to a man who was completely
bald
.”

Roberta was upset too. She refused to stay and watch the destruction. She hurried out to her car and drove off to work. Only Charlene was in top form. “They'll wreck it today, won't they, Daddy I want to see!”

The decisive moment had arrived. With his heart in his mouth, Bob Gast shouted, “Go ahead, get on with it.”

At once the bull-necked driver released his brake and opened the throttle and began wallowing forward.

“Come on, you guys,” cried Trudy Tuck. She ran across the churned-up grass and took a defiant posture in front of Annie's windows.

“Oh, God,” said Homer, as Mary jerked his arm and ran after Trudy.

Minnie Peck came too, along with all the other protesters, forty-three supporters of artists' rights, beauty, creative genius, and revolution, as well as a number of people in favor of any sort of excitement, while television cameramen and
Globe
photographers had a field day. Annie's friends lined up in a crowd before the house, facing the great reaching arm and jaw of the machine. They shouted and shook their fists and waggled their signs. Behind the oncoming juggernaut Mary Kelly caught a glimpse of a white-faced Robert Gast and his awestruck little daughter. Unnoticed at one side, the president of Quincy Contractors nodded his head and crooked his finger.

The driver saw the nod, he saw the encouraging finger. Relentlessly he ground forward, refusing to slacken speed. The threatening jaw on the end of the machine's long arm wobbled to within six feet of Minnie Peck before she screamed and fled. The others scrambled after her.

Window glass shattered. Posts and beams collapsed. Bookcases crumpled. A thousand books tumbled to the floor. The edge of the roof gave way with a shriek of ripped-out nails, and part of the ceiling fell in a shower of plaster.

There were screams and boos from the sidelines. Annie's dream house, the glorious room she had designed with her own hands, her beautiful high windows and perfect kitchen, her perfect, perfect house—it was all being shattered and destroyed by the great dragon teeth of the wrecking machine, as it opened its jaw and crushed and tore and turned and came back for more.

Annie couldn't bear it. Sobbing, she cowered under the wooden roof of Flimnap's truck, wondering why in the hell he wasn't there. He had known the crisis was coming, he had prepared for the worst, he had unscrewed the roof of his gypsy caravan and dismantled Annie's scaffolding, and then he had reassembled the pieces, making a shelter against the collapse of the roof, a barricade in front of her painted wall. And then, once again, he had vanished.
Oh, where the hell are you, Flimnap?

The dozer driver's red face stared down impassively at the wrecked south side of Annie's house, and then he pulled on his stick to swing the grapple to the right.

“Christ,” muttered Homer. Galloping across the ruined grass, he mounted the high step of the cab and yelled at the driver, “Look, give her time to move out.” Stumbling down again, he shouted at Bob Gast, “Come on, we'll move the furniture out. Give us a little time.”

“Well, for Christ's sake, you've had all the time in the world.” Gast jerked his head at the machine. “Five hundred dollars an hour, this thing is costing me. You want to pay for it? Be my guest.”

“We'll manage,” said Homer curtly. “Don't worry about it.”

“Well, okay, then.” Bob looked at the wrecking contractor, who nodded at the operator. The heavy throbbing of the engine died away and the machine fell silent. The driver took off his hard hat and heaved himself out of the cab. Glowering, Gast disappeared, tugging behind him a reluctant Charlene.

The cause was lost. Annie's friends looked at each other mournfully. “Come on,” said Mary. “Let's take everything out the front door.”

Annie didn't like it. When Mary and Homer stumbled around the wreckage and looked in at her under Flimnap's roof, she grasped Mary's hand and whispered, “Never mind about the furniture. Let him knock down everything. Everything except my wall. I don't give a damn about the rest. Let him do his worst. I'm not leaving. He'll have to kill me before he knocks down my wall.” Her eyes were glittering, her hair was wild.

Mary knelt beside her and put her arms around her. Homer was exhausted. But he knew perfectly well that Annie's resistance wasn't mere surface flamboyance like Trudy Tuck's. She spoke from a granite core. She meant what she said. Gast's hired machine would crush her under its tracks before she would abandon her wall. He pleaded with her: “Oh, come on, Annie. We might as well save what we can.”

“Listen, Annie,” said Mary craftily, “that highboy belonged to your great-great-grandfather, and you know what? He was my ancestor too. You've got to save it. And what about Eddy Gast's pictures? You can't let anything happen to them.”

“Oh, all right,” said Annie, her voice thick with tears. “Well, okay. Just keep those cameras out of here.” She kicked at a heap of fallen books, and began picking them up. “There are a lot of empty boxes in the laundry.”

Everybody helped. Even the rubberneckers lent a hand, lugging out carton after carton while Mary barred the door against inquisitive gate-crashers with cameras. Let Annie's house stay private, at least for the few moments it continued to exist.

The driveway was soon littered with her possessions. “What about the fridge?” said Henry Coombs. “It'd be a shame to let it go to waste.”

“It's on little wheels,” said Annie. Desperately she grasped one side while Henry took the other. Rocking the refrigerator this way and that, they pulled it out from the wall.

Perry Chestnut unearthed a Phillips screwdriver, and like a good sport he got to work on the dishwasher. “It's just a matter of a few screws, and then you pull out the hose.”

“Annie, what about all these jars of paint?” said Henrietta Willsey.

At this Annie broke down. “No, no, don't take them away. I need them. I'm nearly done. I've got to finish. I've got to finish my wall.”

Chapter 47

Build it up with gold and silver,

Gold and silver, gold and silver!

Build it up with gold and silver,

My fair lady!

Gold and silver I've not got,

I've not got, I've not got!

Gold and silver I've not got,

My fair lady!

Mother Goose rhyme

I
t was only a pause in the storm. The grappling machine was still parked on the south side of the house, its long arm folded back on itself, its jaw resting on the ground, its three upper teeth meshed with the two below.

The operator of the machine had taken himself off. He sat on the stone wall with his feet dangling among thorny canes of blackberry. When he jerked on the pull-top of his can of beer, it fizzed out and frothed all over his lap, and he said,
“Mierda.”

Robert Gast showed up to complain that somebody might have the courtesy to hire a moving van. “You've got the entire driveway cluttered up with furniture. What the hell are you going to do with all this stuff?”

They were down to the rugs and the contents of Annie's linen cupboard. Henry and Lily Coombs picked up the last of her books and blew on them to remove the plaster dust. People sat yawning in the sunlight on Annie's upholstered chairs. A television cameraman wandered around lazily, recording the scene. He was waiting for real action, the collapse of the house. Of course it wouldn't be like the fall of an entire high-rise building, with thousands of tons of steel and concrete gently descending in slow motion, but in a milder way it would have the same charm—order followed by chaos.

The removal of Annie's furniture was almost done. Homer and Mary parked the headboard of her bed against a tree, and Homer mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “What are we going to do with all this stuff? We can't take it to our place. Our house is too small.”

“Oh, ugh,” said Mary. She was worn out. Her back would never be the same. “There's a storage place on Route 2A.” She stretched out on the grass. “Of course, there's always my sister's barn, there on Barrett's Mill Road. But poor old Gwen, we can't crowd more things in there while she's away. She's already storing Freddy's boat, and Miranda's boyfriend's stuff, and John's old muscle-building apparatus, and your old files, remember, Homer? You promised to remove them as soon as you got organized, and that was ten years ago.”

“Oh, Lord, I keep forgetting.” Gasping, Homer sat down beside Mary. “Look, the furniture's no problem. What are we going to do about Annie?”

“Oh, Homer, it's not her fault.”

“The thing is, she swears she won't leave. She's going to sit right there in front of that wall while forty tons of machinery comes straight at her.”

“Well, maybe being stubborn will work.” Mary looked at him defiantly. “Homer, she won't be alone. I'm going to sit right there beside her. The guy won't go through with it. No matter how many court opinions Gast has on his side, it would be murder if anybody got hurt. Besides, if she can hold out long enough, maybe we can get something on the Gasts.” Mary sat up and grasped Homer's arm. “Hurry up, Homer. Find something. I know it wasn't Annie's fault that little Eddy died.”

“Oh, I see,” whined Homer, “it's all up to me.”

Gast was back. “Okay, that's enough,” he said loudly. “Now get that woman out.”

Annie's friends came back to life. They jumped up, prepared to witness the collision between an irresistible force—the grappling machine—and an immovable object—Annie Swann and her wall. The television crew came alive too, as did the reporter from the
Globe
and the one from the
Boston Herald.

Gast glowered at Mary Kelly. “She's your relative, right? Get her out of there.”

Mary turned her back on him, and walked in the front door. “Annie, are you okay?”

Annie was alone in her ruined living room, using a broom to sweep broken glass into a heap. It was a housewifely action, as though she were still surrounded by four solid walls, as though one side of her house were not gaping open to the wind and weather.

“I'm okay,” said Annie, sweeping too vigorously, sending fragments of glass whizzing across the floor.

“Oh, goddamnit,” said Homer, coming in after his wife, resigned to the necessity of joining Annie's death-defying stand against the monster machine. He grinned at her. “Why didn't I marry into a sensible family?”

Annie laughed. “Sorry, Uncle Homer. That was your big mistake.”

The enormous grinding whine of the diesel engine began once more, and the scream of the hydraulic pumps sending oil into the pistons at high pressure. Minnie Peck was there again, along with Trudy Tuck, Lily and Henry Coombs, Wally Feather, Henrietta Willsey, and Perry Chestnut. This time they were not whooping and shouting. Their warlike spirit was gone.