“It’s no good,” said Taine. “It’s broke. Haven’t had the time to fix it.”
“I don’t think so, Hiram. I just turned it on. It’s beginning to warm up.”
“It’s beginning to—Hey, let me see!” yelled Taine.
Beasly told the truth. A faint hum was coming from the tubes.
A voice came in, gaining in volume as the set warmed up.
It was speaking gibberish.
“What kind of talk is that?” asked Beasly.
“I don’t know,” said Taine, close to panic now.
First the television set, then the stove and now the radio!
He spun the tuning knob and the pointer crawled slowly across the dial face instead of spinning across as he remembered it, and station after station sputtered and went past.
He tuned in the next station that came up and it was strange lingo, too—and he knew by then exactly what he had.
Instead of a $39.50 job, he had here on the kitchen table an all-band receiver like they advertised in the fancy magazines.
He straightened up and said to Beasly: “See if you can get someone speaking English. I’ll get on with the eggs.”
He turned on the second burner and got out the frying pan. He put it on the stove and found eggs and bacon in the refrigerator.
Beasly got a station that had band music playing.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“That’s fine,” said Taine.
Towser came out from the bedroom, stretching and yawning. He went to the door and showed he wanted out.
Taine let him out.
“If I were you,” he told the dog, “I’d lay off that woodchuck. You’ll have all the woods dug up.”
“He ain’t digging after any woodchuck, Hiram.”
“Well, a rabbit, then.”
“Not a rabbit, either. I snuck off yesterday when I was supposed to be beating rugs. That’s what Abbie got so sore about.”
Taine grunted, breaking eggs into the skillet.
“I snuck away and went over to where Towser was. I talked with him and he told me it wasn’t a woodchuck or a rabbit. He said it was something else. I pitched in and helped him dig. Looks to me like he found an old tank of some sort buried out there in the woods.”
“Towser wouldn’t dig up any tank,” protested Taine. “He wouldn’t care about anything except a rabbit or a woodchuck.”
“He was working hard,” insisted Beasly. “He seemed to be excited.”
“Maybe the woodchuck just dug his hole under this old tank or whatever it might be.”
“Maybe so,” Beasly agreed. He fiddled with the radio some more. He got a disk jockey who was pretty terrible.
Taine shoveled eggs and bacon onto plates and brought them to the table. He poured big cups of coffee and began buttering the toast.
“Dive in,” he said to Beasly.
“This is good of you, Hiram, to take me in like this. I won’t stay no longer than it takes to find a job.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly say—”
“There are times,” said Beasly, “when I get to thinking I haven’t got a friend and then I remember your ma, how nice she was to me and all—”
“Oh, all right,” said Taine.
He knew when he was licked.
He brought the toast and a jar of jam to the table and sat down, beginning to eat.
“Maybe you got something I could help you with,” suggested Beasly, using the back of his hand to wipe egg off his chin.
“I have a load of furniture out in the driveway. I could use a man to help me get it down into the basement.”
“I’ll be glad to do that,” said Beasly. “I am good and strong. I don’t mind work at all. I just don’t like people jawing at me.”
They finished breakfast and then carried the furniture down into the basement. They had some trouble with the Governor Winthrop, for it was an unwieldy thing to handle.
When they finally horsed it down, Taine stood off and looked at it. The man, he told himself, who slapped paint onto that beautiful cherrywood had a lot to answer for.
He said to Beasly: “We have to get the paint off that thing there. And we must do it carefully. Use paint remover and a rag wrapped around a spatula and just sort of roll it off. Would you like to try it?”
“Sure, I would. Say, Hiram, what will we have for lunch?”
“I don’t know,” said Taine. “We’ll throw something together. Don’t tell me you’re hungry.”
“Well, it was sort of hard work, getting all that stuff down here.”
“There are cookies in the jar on the kitchen shelf,” said Taine. “Go and help yourself.”
When Beasly went upstairs, Taine walked slowly around the basement. The ceiling, he saw, was still intact. Nothing else seemed to be disturbed.
Maybe that television set and the stove and radio, he thought, was just their way of paying rent to me. And if that were the case, he told himself, whoever they might be, he’d be more than willing to let them stay right on.
He looked around some more and could find nothing wrong.
He went upstairs and called to Beasly in the kitchen.
“Come on out to the garage, where I keep the paint. We’ll hunt up some remover and show you how to use it.”
Beasly, a supply of cookies clutched in his hand, trotted willingly behind him.
As they rounded the corner of the house they could hear Towser’s muffled barking. Listening to him, it seemed to Taine that he was getting hoarse.
Three days, he thought—or was it four?
“If we don’t do something about it,” he said, “that fool dog is going to get himself wore out.”
He went into the garage and came back with two shovels and a pick.
“Come on,” he said to Beasly. “We have to put a stop to this before we have any peace.”
Towser had done himself a noble job of excavation. He was almost completely out of sight. Only the end of his considerably bedraggled tail showed out of the hole he had clawed in the forest floor.
Beasly had been right about the tanklike thing. One edge of it showed out of one side of the hole.
Towser backed out of the hole and sat down heavily, his whiskers dripping clay, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.
“He says that it’s about time that we showed up,” said Beasly.
Taine walked around the hole and knelt down. He reached down a hand to brush the dirt off the projecting edge of Beasly’s tank. The clay was stubborn and hard to wipe away, but from the feel of it the tank was heavy metal.
Taine picked up a shovel and rapped it against the tank. The tank gave out a clang.
They got to work, shoveling away a foot or so of topsoil that lay above the object. It was hard work and the thing was bigger than they had thought and it took some time to get it uncovered, even roughly.
“I’m hungry,” Beasly complained.
Taine glanced at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.
“Run on back to the house,” he said to Beasly. “You’ll find something in the refrigerator and there’s milk to drink.”
“How about you, Hiram? Ain’t you ever hungry?”
“You could bring me back a sandwich and see if you can find a trowel.”
“What you want a trowel for?”
“I want to scrape the dirt off this thing and see what it is.”
He squatted down beside the thing they had unearthed and watched Beasly disappear into the woods.
A man, he told himself, might better joke about it—if to do no more than keep his fear away.
Beasly wasn’t scared, of course. Beasly didn’t have the sense to be scared of a thing like this.
Twelve feet wide by twenty long and oval shaped. About the size, he thought, of a good-size living room. And there never had been a tank of that shape or size in all of Willow Bend.
He fished his jackknife out of his pocket and started to scratch away the dirt at one point on the surface of the thing. He got a square inch free of dirt and it was no metal such as he had ever seen. It looked for all the world like glass.