“Sorry,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m feeling a little abnormal today.”
“Is that meant to be a joke?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, it’s not funny. You have been acting abnormal recently — losing all that money on a horse race last week, going for those long walks alone every night, drinking down in that awful café and staying so late I have to phone you to come home.”
“I like to walk. And I drink coffee, almost exclusively.”
“There’s coffee at home.”
“Yes.”
“But you prefer to go down there.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He had a sudden impulse to tell her the real reason but the impulse went lame before it could move. He knew he would never have the nerve to tell her even half of the truth. “Gomez is an old patient of mine. I feel obliged to patronize him.”
“Very considerate of you.”
“Besides, when I go for a walk I like to have some kind of destination. Gomez’s place is just the right distance.”
“Does anyone ever see you in there?”
“If they look around, I imagine they see me. Why?”
“The place seems awfully low class. I wouldn’t want any of our friends to see you there.”
“Any real doctors, you mean?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, I’ll make you a promise, Elaine. If I ever see any real doctor coming in the front door I’ll sneak out through the kitchen.”
He expected her to get angry or at least to accuse him of sarcasm. She did neither. “Thank you, Gordon,” she said calmly. “That will be very kind of you.”
“Elaine, before you go, I’d like to ask you one question.”
“Ask it.”
“How did you first find out I went down to Gomez’s place?”
“You can’t keep a secret in this town. Only a fool would try.”
“You’re sure I have secrets?”
“Your face is crawling with them.”
Hazel had come in the back door but they were too engrossed in the quarrel to notice her. They stood in the hot, dark little hall, eyeing each other like fighters planning the next, the most devastating blow.
“Pardon me,” Hazel said.
They both turned and looked at her as if she had dropped from another planet to invade their private world. Neither of them spoke.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Hazel said, addressing Elaine. “I just came back to help Dr. Foster pour up an inlay... My, it’s certainly hot, isn’t it?”
Elaine blinked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
“A perfect day for the beach.”
“Yes, I thought so too. Apparently I was wrong.” She buttoned the little bolero she wore over her yellow linen sundress, and slung the rope straps of her beach purse over her left shoulder. “Well, I’ll be going now, Gordon. I don’t want to interfere with anything you and Hazel had planned.”
“I’ll take you out to the car.”
“Don’t bother. I’m quite accustomed to finding my way around alone.” She walked down the hall to the back door, passing Hazel without a glance. “When you’re ready to come home, Gordon, give me a call.”
“All right.”
“Unless you’d prefer a nice long walk.”
Gordon colored. “I’ll walk.”
“Good. And I’ll have a pot of coffee waiting for you. You like coffee so much.”
She closed the door behind her very softly to indicate to Gordon that she was not in the least angry.
She went out into the court, past the goldfish pond and the lantana hedges, holding her head high, looking like a real doctor’s wife. But when she reached the sidewalk she began to tremble so violently that she could hardly walk. She stood for a moment and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. Behind her closed lids there were no pictures, only a moving mass of colors, the reds of rage, the grays of terror.
Gordon turned to Hazel. “Don’t say anything.”
“I had no inten—”
“In fact, it might be a good idea if you went home.”
“But—”
“Now.”
“All right.”
When both the women were gone, he began to whistle again.
4
From a distance Hazel’s house looked like a small white box set right against the foot of the mountains in a grove of live-oak trees. But as Hazel drove up Castillo Street the box enlarged into a house, the live-oak trees stepped back a hundred yards into their proper place, and the mountains were six or seven miles away, the color of violets seen through frosted glass.
Hazel had lived in the town all her life. When she was a child she liked to believe that these mountains were the highest in the world, roadless, inaccessible, to be climbed only by daring men with ropes and pickaxes and spiked boots. It was quite a disappointment to her when her brother Harold, at the age of ten, accompanied his Boy Scout troop on a weekend trip to the Lookout Tower and returned unharmed. Harold reported great dangers, some real, like poison oak and rattlesnakes, some imagined, like tigers and man-eating plants; but he had worn ordinary gym shoes and no one in the party had carried a pickaxe.
Hazel stepped out of the car and the roadless, inaccessible mountains were blue dwarfs of hills. She opened the gate of the picket fence and crossed the back yard, stepping carefully around the gopher holes and the clusters of nettles that stung like wasps, ducking to avoid the spider webs spun from the tangle of geraniums to the clothesline, and waiting while a lizard shimmied across her path into the safety of the anise weeds which had grown large as shrubs beside the wall of the garage. Crossing the back yard was as hazardous as Harold’s trip up the mountain. When Hazel was feeling a little depressed, and consequently vulnerable to superstition and guilt, she believed that her back yard, with all its sprawling reproduction and confusion of nature, was getting back at her for certain lapses in her own life.
She had tried once to explain it to George: “It’s like the minute my back is turned, things happen — you know? — they all get together and whoop it up.”
Hazel never caught them whooping it up, but the evidence was there: an extra million ants hustling up and down the orange tree, more nests of snails at the roots of the geraniums, new little mounds of earth made by new little gophers, and fresh spider webs strung across the windows and under the eaves. She hosed the ants off the orange tree, she swept away the spider webs and crushed the snails with a spade. She put poisoned grain into the gopher holes. The gophers smelled her scent and avoided the grain, and eventually it sprouted up all over the yard into bright green tufts of wild rice. She set metal traps baited with raw apple and raisins. In order to evade the traps, the gophers dug more and deeper tunnels.
After that she tried an entirely new system, suggested by Josephine’s cousin who owned a ranch and presumably knew gophers like the back of his hand. In every open hole, Hazel stuck the top half of a broken beer bottle. Josephine’s ranching cousin claimed that gophers were unable to turn around in their holes and that they would commit involuntary suicide on the jagged ends of glass. The beer bottles sticking out all over the yard puzzled everyone, including the gophers. They nibbled a little of the glass, found it too hard to chew, and returned to their normal diet. One of the gophers died of old age and overeating.
Just as the weeds and animals had got out of control in Hazel’s back yard, so had the people in her life, her cousin, Ruth, her younger brother, Harold, who drove a truck for a furniture store, Harold’s wife, Josephine, and, in a few more months, Josephine’s child. There was no longer any minute of the day or any square foot of the house that Hazel could call her own.
Even before she opened the kitchen door, she could hear them talking, Ruth’s high, taut, suffering voice, and Harold’s quiet worried one.