She saw Manuel in his tree house, surrounded by the yapping snarling faces of the little human animals. Manuel, I will help you. Manuel spat into the dirt.
Mr. Thursten shuffled up and down the aisles, pushing his brush ahead of him, gathering up the litter of the day. He knew Miss Kane was speaking but he didn’t hear her words. He was immune to noise and engrossed in his passion for cleaning up. All his aggressive and destructive instincts had been channelized into this one great passion. He loved to collect little piles of rubbish and thrust them savagely into the incinerator. At home he burned his mail as soon as he had read it. He was a bachelor, and did his own housework, and when he cooked his own meals he always washed and dried the dishes from one course before he began eating another course. After the meal he emptied the garbage on a newspaper, squeezing and compressing it into a small neat satisfying bundle. Nearly every day he hung all his blankets and his rugs on the clothesline and beat them into submission. He cleaned the mirrors and windows until they squeaked in protest, and he scrubbed his kitchen with chlorine water until the linoleum peeled and his hands were raw. Mr. Thursten was fortunate. His peculiarities accorded with his job and were misinterpreted as virtues.
“Mr. Thursten—”
The brush paused.
“Mr. Thursten, I wonder if — I feel quite giddy — is there, could you fetch me a glass of water?”
Mr. Thursten brought her some water in a paper cup. When she had finished the water, he took the cup and folded it over and over into a tight, tiny rectangle. Mr. Thursten took particular care of this rectangle. He put it into the incinerator separately, and as it snuffled and expired he had a nice loose feeling inside.
Mr. Thursten, Margaret, Manuel, they had all been a part of the last year. When the year ended Miss Kane ceased to exist. She became Ruth again, and it was Ruth who stood at the bedroom window looking out at the playground of another school, watching the anonymous children whose faces seemed so familiar.
“You took your job too seriously,” Hazel repeated.
Ruth turned from the window, wiping the palms of her hands on her apron. “I guess I’ll start the meat loaf.”
“You never admit anything. If you won’t tell people things they can’t help you.”
“My goodness, as if I—”
“Why were you in there bawling?”
“I tell you I wasn’t, Hazel.”
“Has it anything to do with the Mexican?”
“What—?” Ruth stopped, on the point of asking, what Mexican? She had been thinking of Manuel, but she realized at once that Hazel didn’t know about the boy in the pepper tree and that she must mean Mr. Escobar. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I just wondered,” Hazel said carefully. “I just thought maybe he’d been rude to you or something. I mean, sometimes you get ideas in your head about certain people, you imagine things.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you do. And I just thought — oh well, skip it. Where’d he go?”
“He said he had to go home and get something; a sprayer. He says the eugenia hedge has some disease called scale.”
“It doesn’t look diseased to me.”
“He showed it to me himself. You know that part at the end where you thought the hedge was just dirty? It isn’t dirt at all. The sap has been sucked out. He showed me some of the things that do it. They’re like little bumps on the wood, hardly noticeable. He scraped some of them away with his thumbnail to show me. I told him, I said, why show me? I’m not the lady of the house, I just work here. And do you know what his answer was? He said he thought I’d be interested. Me, interested.” Ruth laughed, and color splashed across her cheeks. “I said—”
“Little bumps,” Hazel said bitterly. “Jesus Murphy, I thought we had everything, gophers, snails, sowbugs, ants, and now we got little bumps besides.”
“They can be sprayed.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with this damn place.”
“Neglect is the matter.”
“Or maybe it isn’t the place, maybe it’s just me. I attract things, that’s all there is to it. I’m like Millie, I’ve got a jinx.”
Ruth looked blank. She didn’t know Millie or the nature of her jinx. “He said if the hedge is sprayed now the other things in the yard won’t catch the disease. He says it’s very catching.”
Like measles, Escobar had said, scraping the little bumps away with this thumbnail while Ruth watched him with fastidious distaste. She did not want to be out in the garden with a Mexican laborer, and she experienced a sense of shock and unreality at finding herself there, and even more strongly, the feeling that a cruel fate had driven her there. I did not come, I was driven.
Persecuted by fate, she stood beside the eugenia hedge and watched Escobar’s thumb. It was thick and blunt, the nail heavy with dirt and every crack in the skin outlined as if in charcoal. The thumb moved, bent on destruction, but without hurry, without savagery.
Like measles, Escobar said.
She jerked her eyes away, she laughed nervously, without mirth, she put her hand in the pocket of her apron and shifted her weight to her other foot. She coughed to clear her throat, and when her throat was cleared she had nothing to say. The rays of the sun pelted her face and she thought of the dark house with the blinds drawn and she could not believe that she had left it to come out here. I was driven.
Still she couldn’t force herself to return to the house, and in the end it was Escobar who left. He said, “I have a hand spray at home. I will go and get it. It is not far.”
She moved with quick jerky steps toward the back door, her head ducked as if to avoid a blow.
Escobar wheeled his bicycle out of the garage. A bicycle was a delicate and expensive vehicle, and Escobar lavished great care on his. It was over four years old now, but there wasn’t a single dent in the mudguard or a nick in the red and green paint. Throughout the years he had equipped it with several pounds of gadgets. It had two headlights, one reflector (plain) and a larger one bearing the words “Watch My Speed!” On the handlebars there was a bell, a horn, a speedometer, a basket and a rabbit’s foot, and from the end of the carrier at the back dangled a skunk’s tail. The original seat was softened with a lamb’s wool cover, and between the seat and the cover a St. Christopher’s medal was hidden.
Escobar adjusted the pedals and swung his right leg over the bar. He rode away, moving his feet up and down in a proud, ponderous, dignified manner. The reflectors winked behind his back, “Watch My Speed!”
From the kitchen window Ruth had seen him pedaling down the street like a grave and happy child.
“It’s a jinx,” Hazel said. “We’re a pair, Millie and me. Where’s my other shoe?”
“I thought you had it.”
“I haven’t.”
“I thought you took it away from her.”
The shoe was located under the bed with the lift flapping loose from the heel, but the dog Wendy had disappeared.
“Jesus Murphy!”
“She didn’t mean it,” Ruth said anxiously. “It can be fixed. Look, it’s easy as pie to fix.” She held the lift in place. “All it needs is a nail or two. I’ll pay for it, naturally. I’m going over to the Fosters’ tonight to sit with the children, and I’ll have the money.”
“Oh nuts, forget it.”
“Very well.”
From outside came a rhythmic hissing sound. A pulse began to beat in Ruth’s temple and the spot of color reappeared at the base of her throat.
“The Mexican’s back,” she said.
She went out into the kitchen and stood at the screen door.
Escobar was spraying the orange tree. She could see his face, among the leaves. It was beautiful and innocent, like Manuel’s face looking down at her through the green feathers of the pepper tree.