Red Sky at Morning (19 page)

Sometimes the house got too oppressive for sleeping, and I'd stay with Steenie for a night or two. Mrs. Stenopolous didn't mind; for a woman with only one child, she was the most harried mother I've ever seen. I think it came from having everything she planned—meals, parties, small chores, sleep—interrupted by frantic telephone calls from women in labor. She knew that no matter what she started she couldn't finish without the telephone ringing. "Hello," she'd say. "Yes, this is Mrs. Stenopolous. Well, he's just sitting down to . . . eight minutes apart, eh? Well, surely you can hold out until. . . . No,
I'm
not a doctor, but . .. Yes, I'll tell him." She'd hang up and walk into the dining room and raise one eyebrow at her husband. "That was Mrs. Gillespie. She's at the Emergency Room, having the world's first baby."

Dr. Stenopolous would take a last look at his dinner, and leave. He was a thin, mild man, and never complained about the work which kept him hopping. He looked like a plumber going out to unplug a toilet; it was his wife who took the great mystery of birth to heart, and I think she loved her role as a martyred wife. "Joshua," she would say to me, "I've given this advice to my son, and I'll give it to you: Never marry an obstetrician. It's hell on earth."

"I wasn't even considering marrying an obstetrician," I said. "The thought never crossed my mind."

"Don't let it. If I ever hear that you're going to marry an obstetrician, I'll come running into the church and make a scene. No human should have to live with an obstetrician. Look. Look at that nice dinner getting cold on the table.
That's
what happens when you get involved with an obstetrician."

"Yes, but that's his dinner, not yours. Yours isn't getting cold."

"Don't argue with me, young man. I tell you, it's a miserable existence and I ought to know. If I knew when these damned babies were being conceived, I'd go from bedroom to bedroom pouring cold water on the couples. The birth rate would drop to nothing."

"Wouldn't that be kind of bad for business?"

"Oh, there's other specialties he could have followed. His best friend at medical school had some brains. He's a dermatologist. Nobody ever wakes him up at three in the morning to treat a hot case of boils. No, sir! I told him, I said, 'Bill go into ophthalmology. Go into eye, ear, nose and throat. Go into pathology. Anything.' But would he listen?"

"Nope," Steenie said. "Wouldn't listen."

"Right," said Mrs. Stenopolous. "Here, have some more
moussaka.
Thank God there's somebody who'll eat my cooking."

On the nights I stayed at Steenie's house he provided me with a bedroll, and I arranged it on the floor near his bed, which wasn't big enough for two. As part of his physical conditioning program, to make himself lean and hard for the Commandos, or the Musketeers, or whatever it was, he turned off the heat and opened all his windows at night. The bedroll, a Sears, Roebuck item designed for sultry nights in the tropics, would begin to become inadequate about two in the morning, and I'd flop around on the concrete-slab floor, and roll into a ball, seeking a warm spot, and finally wake Steenie.

"I'm freezing my tail off down here. I'm turning blue."

"Really cold down there, is it?"

"You wouldn't believe it, but there's an inch of frost on the bedroll. I think my toes are starting to rot."

"Well, if it's that cold. . . ." He'd whistle, and his dog Thunder, an eleven-year-old sheepdog-poodle mixture, would drag his frail old bones off the floor and jump into bed with Steenie. "Can't let my faithful hound get too cold," he'd say. "Man's best friend deserves better treatment than that. There you go, boy. Snuggle down there under the covers. Attaboy. Good old Thunder."

My mother didn't really approve of my staying with the Stenopolouses, because they weren't in my class. I finally pointed out that there wasn't anyone in Sagrado who measured up to her standards, and that I was trying to make friends with the best of a bad lot. It was that or go crazy for lack of companionship, I said.

"You
could
learn to play bridge," she suggested.

"Never," I said. "I just haven't got the head for it. I'll have to take my chances with the locals."

"I wish we were back in Mobile," she wailed.

A bulky envelope from Dad arrived one afternoon shortly before Christmas. In it was a letter for me, and what appeared to be a parchment scroll. I looked at it more closely; it was a parchment scroll. The letter said:

I have written to your mother and told her, clearly I hope, that Amadeo and Excilda are technically unfireable except for cause. Cause consists of grand larceny or murdering a member of the family. They work for us at a stipulated salary, and have a contract to do so. The contract is no less binding because it is oral and not written.
If the Yunque River were navigable, I would steam up the channel right now in this ponderous bucket and knock a few heads together. As it isn't, I am forced to rely upon you and your mother to behave like rational people.
The document Amadeo requested is enclosed. I can't vouch for its legality, but it's a damned fine piece of draftsmanship. A young Seaman First named Boudreau, a Negro who studied art at the University of Chicago, did the lettering and design, and even located the parchment, no mean feat on a destroyer escort. Needless to say, Boudreau is a steward aboard this vessel, having advanced to that post in six years from his former position as garbage collector. I feel he merits a somewhat higher responsibility in the Navy but, as the Skipper pointed out, he lacks several credits toward his M.A.
Don't worry too much about that business in Bastogne. I have it on excellent authority that it's a last-ditch act of desperation by Von Rundstedt. The Germans are getting short of fuel, a happy situation in which I hope I am playing some small part.
For God's sake keep things going evenly around there, and try being a prop instead of a burden, for a change. The psychologist at Point Clear told me that, in spite of the severe brain damage, you would be capable of simple tasks, like feeding yourself and locating the men's room.
By the way: Romeo Bonino is congenitally poverty-stricken and can't afford decent wine, of which he's extremely fond. I believe he ordinarily drinks something called Flor de Yunque, an insecticide produced in the valley. Please take him some bottles from the cellar (not the claret, please). Many of the smaller red Burgundies are going to turn into salad dressing if not drunk soon, and no one would enjoy them more than Romeo.
I give the war, in this theater, six more months, Von Rundstedt notwithstanding. My scheme to sail up the Rhine with a fleet of shrimp trawlers and overpower the enemy with the stench has been turned down by a nearsighted group of Academy people, and we shall have to continue the fight along more orthodox lines.
It is time for me to make a tour of the various officers of the deck. They are a generally inept bunch, particularly an Ensign named Taylor, who was anchor man in his Reserve class at Southern Illinois University. When he isn't spitting into the wind, he sees U-Boat periscopes in every clump of flotsam, and now holds the fleet record. Once he thought he saw one rising twenty yards off the beach at Cannes, but it turned out to be the foot of a skinny, eight-year-old French boy who was diving for periwinkles.
Carry on,
Dad

The parchment scroll was heavily decorated with loops and curlicues in several colors, and the "K" was illuminated, like the letters in hand-written Bibles. It said:

Know all Men by these Presents, Greetings:
I, the undersigned Frances Arnold, holding a Commission as Lieutenant Commander in the State's legitimate Force of Arms (Nautical), and being engaged in Combat
á outrance
with the State's Enemy (A. Hitler, Commander in Chief), and therefore unable to discharge my several Duties as Head of Household in Corazón Sagrado without committing Desertion and bringing Disgrace upon my Head and Dishonor to my Family Name, do hereby appoint my Son, Joshua M. Arnold, aged seventeen years, my Agent and Attorney in Fact, and do further State that he may issue, give and pronounce Orders, Edicts, Commands, Directions and Ukases pertinent and relevant to the Operation of said Household and abutting Lands, providing he seeks Sage Counsel before so doing, and doesn't get too big for his Britches. Done the Eighteenth Day of December, A.D. 1944, aboard the Destroyer Escort USS JOHN T. MAYS, Captain Philip Baines, U.S.N., Commanding.

My mother got a letter from him in the same delivery. I don't know what it said; she never showed it to me. She came in later and said, "I've been thinking it over, and I can see I shouldn't have let the Montoyas go. I really can't run this house by myself, particularly with a guest here."

"Yes," I said. "About that guest. How much longer is he going to stay? I don't know anything about courtly manners, but I think his welcome's pretty well worn out."

"Oh, surely he can stay for Christmas. It would be awful to ask him to leave just before Christmas."

"Well, maybe you can find another bridge partner after New Year's. Jimbob goes, the sooner the better."

"He's a very lonely man, Joshua."

"I don't wonder. Do you think he'd still be hanging around if Dad were here? Do you think Dad would stand for him? Do you know what the talk is around school?"

"Talk? School? Do you mean that people are gossiping?"

"Look, Mother. This is a very small town. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Mostly they don't care, but they know. I've been getting the needle since he got here. Your reputation is about shot."

She spaced her words out slowly. "That . . . is . . . the . . . most . . . disgusting . . . thing. . . ."

"Sure it's disgusting. How do people know that all you do is yell 'no trump' and 'vulnerable' at each other and sip a little sherry together? Don't forget: You think these people are low and coarse. Why should you be surprised that they think low, coarse thoughts?"

"That . . . is . . . ridiculous."

"Sure it is. So you fired the Montoyas, and there went the chaperones. And it was you who used to give me that stuff about avoiding the appearance of evil."

"The Montoyas will come back, won't they?" she asked, in a small and subdued voice. "You'll reach them for me, won't you? Maybe Excilda can roast a turkey or something. You know, I'll have to ask the girls about this. I wonder if they think I. . . . No, it just isn't possible."

"I'll talk to the Montoyas," I said. "And please keep Jimbob away from Amadeo. According to this, I can give the orders from here on." I handed her the scroll, and watched her while she read it thoughtfully.

"Your father is sometimes a very whimsical man," she said. "The war must be a great strain on him."

"He's holding up better than you are," I told her.

Then Jimbob began to whimper for a snack in his bedroom, a pitiable sound, and I walked downtown for a hamburger and to see a movie, "Arsenic and Old Lace." It gave me some interesting ideas for the disposal of Jimbob, but digging up a concrete cellar is rugged work.

I spent my whole lunch period the next day in a phone booth at Rumpp's Pharmacy, trying to reach Amadeo. The only telephone in Río Conejo is at the combination post office-opera house-alchemist's shop, and the girl who answered said to hang on, there'd be a truck passing pretty soon and she'd ask the driver to stop at the Montoyas' house and say there was a phone call. It took forty minutes for the message to be delivered and for Amadeo to drive to the store.

He said he'd received a letter from Dad, too, and that he and Excilda would be in Monday, and if Mr. Buel even so much as looked at him funny he'd hit him with whatever he had in his hand at the time, and he hoped it would be an axe.

Then I called Dad's Sagrado lawyer, a Mr. Gunther, who'd played bridge at the house a few times. I don't know why he needed a lawyer in Sagrado; the only time he came in handy was when Dad bought the place in the '30s, and somebody had to untangle all the problems about the title. Every piece of land around here had, at one time, belonged either to the Indians or to the King of Spain (and his title seemed a little shaky to me). If somebody bought as much as a square yard of
caliche
with a dead coyote buried in it, a lawyer had to trace the land's history back to 1634. First there would be the general, overall grant from His Majesty, which might include a million square
varas
of what he called "New Spain," an area bordered roughly by the Mississippi, on the east, and the Pacific Ocean, on the west. Nobody knew exactly how big a
vara
was, but it was somewhere between a cubit and a league, its length depending on who the viceroy was at the time. Once the lawyer got that figured out, he began sorting through the families that had owned it and willed it to their children. The families were named Vigil or Espinosa, and wrote their wills in old-fashioned Spanish, in a spidery hand, with light purple ink. Then there would be histories of counterclaims, suits to "quiet title" which never seemed to work, liens by banks and insurance companies, abandonments, quit-claim deeds, reappraisals, tax sales and something called "eminent domain seizure for consideration." A good lawyer who paced himself could make a land sale last for ten years and send his kids to Princeton on the fees.

Gunther hadn't been allowed to spend more than six months on the deal when Dad bought the land and built the house, and it had always galled him. But when I talked to him, and said it was very important, he agreed to see me in his office after school.

I showed him the parchment scroll that Dad had sent to me, and he read it—the way lawyers seem to read everything—very slowly and carefully, with a faint sneer, as if it had a mashed bug on it.

"This is a very singular instrument," he said when he'd finished. "I assume it's some sort of joke."

"No, sir, it's no joke," I said, and told him the details, leaving out the part about the sherry and Doctor Temple.

"How old are you, Joshua?" he asked. "Not more than seventeen, surely."

"Seventeen is right," I said. "Why?"